THE IMPOSSIBLE MEME

Okay, we've all seen that meme: William Shakespeare wrote King Lear while under quarantine in London during the Bubonic plague.

The intention of circulating this (probably relatively true-ish) factoid, of course, is to make us all feel like a bunch of whining slackers. Want to feel even worse? Remember that Anne Frank wrote her famous Diary while hiding from the Nazis in a cramped attic in Amsterdam with her family of four and three other people. For two years. 

The fruits of these labors, composed under impossibly stressful conditions, are inarguably masterpieces, Frank's Diary for its honesty, optimism and compassion, and Lear for its brilliant and enduring insights into the human condition.

So what are the rest of us waiting for? Now that we're all under house arrest, we have nothing but time.

But consider too that Lear is one of Shakespeare's darkest plays, in every respect. It's full of howling storms and furious rages, delusion, betrayal, calamity, madness, folly, treachery and despair. Hard not to see at least a psychological parallel between the work itself and the temper of the times in which it was written.

Colette: Holed up like a Parisienne

So, if I wanted to write something gloomy and despondent, this would be the perfect time to do it! Indeed, there would be no excuse not to spend these grey, wet, solitary days hammering away at the keyboard, grappling angst and uncertainty into something (hopefully) brilliant.

But, no. Me, I'm trying to cobble together a lighthearted romantic comedy, full of magic and music, for Young Adult readers.

It's the second book (although not a sequel) stipulated in my contract for Beast: A Tale of Love and Revenge, which was already too dark and perverse for the general YA readership, according to my Goodreads reviews. This new one is supposed to be fun and upbeat.

Hah.

Blissfully untarnished by reality

Not that it couldn't be done. When the Nazis marched in to occupy France, the celebrated novelist Colette was 67 (the same age I am now), and nearly bedridden. Yet, holed up in her Paris apartment for the duration, she produced Gigi. Harking back to France's golden age of the Belle Epoque, it told the sunny tale of a spirited teenage girl raised to be a courtesan who defies expectations by charming her designated client into marriage.

And I have no doubt that if my Art Boy was still here to shelter in place with me, he would have turned out three or four of his magical paintings by now, and sketches for many more.

His work was always blissfully untarnished by everyday reality; his ideas bubbled up directly out of the teeming wellspring of his own imagination — flying fish, joyous dancing figures, pink bunnies and all. How he would have relished the excuse to stay home and paint all day!

I'm trying to view this temporary (we hope) dystopian sojourn as an opportunity to be relished. That's what James would do! And who knows? If the present coronavirus lockdown stretches on for another eternity, a deep plunge into the imagination might be just the escape I need.



(Above: Act of Creation, James Aschbacher)

FRENCH TWIST

Country girl becomes celebrated author in lively Colette

Even for an era of such artistic and cultural ferment as the turn of the last century, famed French author Colette led an extraordinary life. She was a country girl dominated by a sophisticated husband who became the toast of Paris for her wildly successful, trendsetting novels.

She was also a music hall performer who scandalized the public, a sexual adventuress who loved men and women, a cross-dresser, and an accidental advocate for equality who had to fight for the right to publish her work under her own name.

Her melodramatic life was always tempered by her wit and wry self-knowledge in her books, reviews, and voluminous letters to friends and family. In his biographical feature, Colette, filmmaker Wash Westmoreland sticks to her early years in Paris, during the metamorphosis by which she would eventually turn herself into the celebrated author.

Reel life: Knightley, West

As portrayed by Keira Knightly, this Colette is all good-humored innocence and coltish bravado. The film ends just as she's about to launch herself back into the world on her own terms, so we never get a sense of the wry wisdom of the author's maturity, but Knightley is appealing as an awakening personality in the making.

The movie begins in 1892, in the remote French country village of Saint-Sauveur. 19-year-old Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (Knightley), her beloved mother, Sido (Fiona Shaw), and her father, are entertaining Willy (Dominic West), a renowned magazine writer and critic from Paris, whose father knew Colette's father in the military. Within a year, Willy and Colette are married and living in Paris.

There she discovers that "Willy" is a cottage industry; he employs other writers to crank out the work that appears in the press under his name. To stave off creditors, her husband decides "Willy" should write a novel, and assigns the task to Colette. When he physically locks her in her study to work, she starts writing about her own schooldays.

Willy, Colette: out of the shadows

The book, Claudine At School, is an immediate bestseller. Together with its three sequels, it influences a generation of young women, who copy Claudine's clothes and hair, bathe with "Claudine" soap, and nibble "Claudine" chocolates. But the books all come out under the name of "Willy," who refuses to compromise his "brand" by allowing Colette to take credit for her own work.

No feature-length movie could do more than scratch the surface of the real-life Colette's long, rich, and productive life (she died in 1954 at age 81), or include her expansive circle of friends, artists, writers, mentors and devotees. But the movie looks beautiful (largely shot in old-world Budapest), and Knightly captures enough of Colette's rebel spirit of adventure to encourage viewers to explore the rest of her fascinating story.

(Read more)

I’m such a sucker for this era of wild experimentation before WWI. Matisse and Picasso were reinventing the world, the Arts and Crafts Movement was redesigning furniture, and women were cutting there hair, agitating for the right to vote, exploring their inner lives, and remaking themselves outside of their husband’s shadows.

There are so many luscious period details in Westmoreland’s movie, you can’t take them in all at once. Just look a the chair back and draperies in this shot of Knightley’s Colette at work at her desk — yow!

Every detail is perfect.

Meanwhile, here’s a companion photo of the real-life Colette at work on the Claudine novels.

At this point, she is still in the prim collar and upswept hair of her early years with Willy. She still had a way to go before morphing into the scandalous, yet acclaimed author beloved for such popular novels as Cherie, and — much later in life — Gigi.

But you can see by her determined chin and serious demeanor that she’s on her way!