Vagabond Heart

 "A female I was, and a female I find myself again; to suffer from it and to rejoice in it."

Renée Néré is my kind of heroine. She's damaged, but still tenacious in the fight; smart, but human enough to second guess such intellect when her heart wants to run free.

She's a 30-something Parisian vaudeville performer whose reveling in a crucible of change and newfound freedom after divorcing a controlling philanderer. Emotionally beaten and bruised by the marriage, Renée is suspicious of romance and isn't keen on surrendering the singular life she has so meticulously assembled for herself. When a handsome and wealthy admirer named Maxime makes his intentions known, Renée is thrust into a tailspin of doubt and temptation, where she wonders if she should allow herself to love again, or remain in a hardened shell of independence.

Colette is my kind of writer. A writer who isn't afraid to prick at human emotion and write about the battle scars. A writer whose works feel so human, so 'lived in'.

Usually I'm not much of a fan of stream-of-consciousness narratives, but Colette's approach at the technique in The Vagabond is exquisite and engaging. Never does Renée's voice wander or sound contrive, and even when it feels frantic it still romantically swings as we experience every doubt, every act of resistance, every passionate surrendering, and every anguished decision. At times while reading a section of prose, I would find myself nodding in agreement, thinking --- is this me? --- even though last I checked I occupy a different skin, a different world than Renée. It's this intimacy towards a character that Colette has achieved best of all in the pages of The Vagabond.

There are claims that this is the most auto-biographical of Colette's works, and that's quite the truth as Renée is in a lot of aspects a vivid rendering of Colette. Like her, Colette was a young woman whose much-older first husband, author and publisher, Henry Gauthier-Villars, was a notorious libertine and an imposing figure in her life. Gauthier-Villars was the one who steered her into a writing career, this at the cost of her own voice, as her classic Claudine series was first published and promoted under her husband's nom-de-plume "Willy".

Most writers often write from experience, and then lie about it later (ha!), but after learning this bit of information I got the sense that Colette, in a way, regained her suppressed voice within the pages of The Vagabond, being one of the first books she wrote that was correctly attributed to her. It's why Renée is written to have such determination for autonomy, and why it's so potent whenever she declares it for herself:

 "You want me to behave like everyone? To make up my mind? Him or somebody else, what does it matter? You want to disturb the peace that I’ve won back, you want to direct my life toward some other concern than the rugged, bracing and natural one of earning my own living? Or are you prescribing a lover for my health, like a purge? What for? I’m feeling well, and thank God, I’m not in love, I’m not in love, I’ll never love anyone, anyone, anyone!"  

Still, Colette's crafting of Renée is more than just a cipher for the author to vent her grievances about life after a difficult divorce. Renée, while fictional, spoke in timbre with a generation of women who were just beginning to discover a desire for independent lifestyles and the power that their own voices carried during the first wave of 20th century feminism. Written in 1910, The Vagabond rode that first crash wave with the novels and characters in such works as Sinclair Lewis' The Job, Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and a bit more similarly, Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career. Novels about women who like Renée wanted to be seen outside of the social rigidity of late 19th century principles and enter the 20th century on their own terms. Whether it was socially, sexually, or by way of enacting on career passions, the attitude of having a 'room of one's own' and living life without being boxed in by gender expectations spoke to a changing cultural tide.

The Vagabond isn't mentioned much in the cannon of feminist-minded works, but to me, it's misbegotten because it's one of the rare stories of the era that doesn't make Renée out as some tragic figure of 'doomed' female independence. She is no Edna Pontiellier or a Lily Bart, causalities of not knowing their 'place' as women. Colette doesn't 'punish' Renée whenever she makes her final decisions about Maxime, her career, or her life in general, but she doesn't completely make her a hard ass. Renée is not without passion for Maxime, and does surrender to his charms from time to time, and some of the scenes are cold shower worthy, but nothing to clutch pearls over. Aside from that what I found more interesting was how Colette wasn't afraid to show the underbelly of independence; the lonely, aching, almost sheer panic that comes when you're in possession of yourself totally and when it has a possibility to slip away:

“There are some days when solitude, for a person of my age, is an intoxicating wine that makes you drunk with freedom, other days when it’s a bitter tonic, and still other days when it’s a poison that makes you bang your head on the wall.”  

“He awakens me with one glance, and I cease to belong to myself. If he puts his lips to mine? In that case, he’s my enemy, the thief who steals me from myself!” 

Still, Colette is more keen to acknowledge that its such vulnerabilities, the pain of having one's heart dragged and then thrown into a garbage disposal, and the fears of reassembling it, that gives Renée strength, and such an interlocking is vital to a woman's survival:

“How many women have known that withdrawal into themselves, that patient retreat which comes after the rebellious tears? I do them this justice, which is flattering to me: it is usually only in her grief that a woman is capable of rising above mediocrity. Her resistance to grief is infinite, it can be applied, and over-applied, without any risk of her dying, just so long as some childish physical cowardice or some religious hope turns her thoughts away from the suicide that would simplify everything.” 

It may be too soon to tell, but The Vagabond will no doubt be one of my favorite reads this year. I deliciously reclined into this novel, soaking in all the great writing, the feminism, the romance, and the sensory details of Parisian Bohemia in the early 20th century. It's one of those novels that I didn't want to leave when the last page was turned, as I wanted to follow Renée further into her journey of self-discovery.

As mentioned, I'm not a divorced French vaudeville dancer, but Renée's struggles to make a life for herself and allow people into her sphere after being shattered felt so familiar to me. I've been there. Know the hurt, the ambivalence, the desire to just 'be' without having to explain yourself even when people want the straight answer, and society wants to answer for you. Still it's the value for oneself, the value for owning your own voice is what I'll mostly revere from this book. The way Colette gives Renée such dignity for herself in the face of her conflict is so intimately sound that whether you agree or disagree with the final verdict Renée serves at the end, you can't help but feel she did it all on her own terms and without having someone put words in her mouth.

Never underestimate the power of a woman, indeed.


from the margins

• rating: *****
• 252 pages
• First published in 1910 // Published September 5 2001 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Translated by: Enid McLeod

• For all my writing friends, Colette has one of the best assessments about being a writer poured out in the most perfect set of prose. Really, this is a mic drop: "To write also means to forget what time it is; It means that lazy spell in the hollow of the couch, the riot of inventiveness that leaves you aching all over and mentally numb, but already rewarded: the bearer of treasures that you slowly unload onto the virgin sheet of paper, in the small ring of light that is sheltered beneath the lamp.” / “To write! To pour out all your sincerest feelings rabidly onto the tempting paper, so quickly, so quickly that your hand sometimes fights back and jibs, overtaxed by the impatient god who guides…and to discover, next day, instead of the golden bough that broke into miraculous blossom in a shining hour, a dry bramble branch, an aborted flower…"

• "Two habits have given me the power to hold back my tears: the habit of concealing my thoughts, and that of blackening my lashes with mascara" ---- why does this book know me so well?!?  

• Talk about impeccable timing...Colette's life is getting the big screen treatment this year, and from the trailer it appears that this biopic will follow her early years when she lived in the shadow of her first husband, explored her bisexuality, and wrote the Claudine books that gave her husband so much acclaim. Yay! And Keira Knightley is just going to play every damn body from the 18th and 19th centuries isn't she? 

• Book Beats:  Renée's theme song in another life is Jane Child's "Don't Wanna Fall In Love". Seriously. Its lyrics captures Renée's mental tug-of-war over Maxime to a tee...just in total '80s synth glory.