The Naughtiness That

Shocked Grandmama

The thing I like best about the collected works of Colette wa the motion picture Gigi.

HOLLYWOOD, and all it stands for, has taken the blame for a lot in the 20th century world which is apt to forget that, on the credit side, it has performed one task for suffering humanity: It has cut culture down to handy, bite size so that it can be swallowed without undue effort by the strictly uncultivated.

For those of sturdier spirit who can take things like Colette straight, in the original French or trans lated, Messrs. Seeker and Warburg, the publishers, are also doing their bit. They now have 14 volumes in their Works of Colette, Uniform Edition, the last of them, Claudine Married, just recently with us.

It was first published in Paris in 1902, as Claudine en Menage, at a time when the essential wickedness of French novels was a firmly established tradition in the island across the Channel. In those days, however, if you wanted to read Colette you had to read her in the original. So far as our researches show, there was no translation into respectable English published for many years after that.

Probably if you had already digested the other two Claudine stories. Claudine at School, and Claudine in Paris, you could more easily cope with the girl en menage.

But having picked the story up in its third episode, all its allusions to the past, wicked though they might be, fall on barren ground.

The subtle reasons—if reasons there be—for Claudine and new husband to revisit Claudine’s old school are lost; and the continual harking back to Fanchette, the cat, and Melie, the servant, are mere dis tractions.

No one who has graduated to contemporary literature in the era

of such works as Peyton Place ai likely to find Claudine’s descriptio of her early married life and he desire to be dominated by he middle-aged writer husband “a brutally honest, so shockingly fran that modern writers on the subjee might reasonably blush” —as th blurb on the dust jacket tells thei they should.

The fact is that nothing date quicker than the “wickedness” of past generation and in spite of th promise of the dust jacket, this par ticular episode in Claudine’s life hai about the same effect on this re viewer as her first encounter wit] Lady Chatterley’s Lover. I discover© the latter with a certain amount o excitement in a bookstall on Cologn railway station in 1955, and read i on a railway journey right acros Germany—only to discover wit] disgust that it was an expurgate! edition with all those passages con taining the little four-letter word we’ve been hearing about so mud lately, replaced by the traditiona row of asterisks.

Whether the missing words-j which we’ve been assured can b( found written on the walls of al State school lavatories—could lifi that story to the point where ar edition of eight million paper-backf went off like hot-cakes, we may nov soon find out. But without them the Lawrence classic rarely rises above a corny account of out-moded con ventions and old social and political theories.

It is one of the unanswered com undrums of literature that books that are considered classical can be so infernally dull. (CLAUDINE MARRIED. Published by Seeker and Warburg. Australian pricej 17/-.)