"Look!"

EARTHLY PARADISE by Colette; edited by Robert Phelps. 505 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $6.95.

Colette was the big cat of 20th century letters. She looked like a cat: eyes long and wild, lips thin and fierce. And she wrote like a cat: sensuality glides through her novels (Cheri, Gigi, Milsou, Claudine, Le Ble en Herbe) as a she-cat glides through a warm spring night. Like a cat, Colette was acutely sensitized to appearance and atmosphere; but she used her characters merely as furniture to rub her sensibilities against. The big cat, most critics have decided since her death in 1954, was not really a big novelist.

This remarkable volume demonstrates that she was a great writer of another kind: a superb expositor of the self in the grand Gallic tradition of Montaigne, Rousseau and Ninon de Lenclos. From 2,000 pages of random reminiscences, which Colette published but never collected, Editor Robert Phelps has skillfully constructed a sort of accidental autobiography that reveals Colette as the richest character in her oeuvre--indeed, as one of the most extraordinary women of the century.

Dreams of Snakes. Sidonie Gabrielle Colette was the youngest kitten of a hardy litter that ran wild on a manor-farm in Burgundy. "Look!" their lusty mother cried a hundred times a day, "Look!" Colette looked, and her descriptions of the farm include some of the loveliest pages in the literature of childhood. "Even then, when I was only five, I so loved the dawn that I would go alone through the mist in search of strawberries, black currants and hairy gooseberries, my blue eyes deepened by the blurred and dewy greenery all around me, my pride swelling at being awake while all the other children were asleep. At that hour I first became aware of my own self and, in an inexpressible state of grace, felt one with the first bird that stirred and the sun so newly born that it still looked not quite round."

At 17, Sidonie was a charming little chatte with long chestnut braids that got tangled with her toes while she slept and made her dream of snakes. One day a sure-enough snake turned up in the plausible person of Henri Gauthier-Villars, a 34-year-old literary hack who married her and then shut her up in his Paris garret. "Put down what you remember of your board-school days," he instructed her bluntly. "Don't be shy of the spicy bits. Money's short."

Literary Lesbians. Sidonie obediently put down what she remembered--Henri was so pleased that he published the story under his own pen name: Willy. In a month, Claudine at School was a bawdy bestseller--Henri was so pleased that he locked her in her room every morning and refused to let her out until she had written her daily quota. In this manner she produced three sequels to Claudine and made her husband famous--Henri was so pleased that he put an end to the marriage.

Broke, bewildered and 33, Sidonie jumped at the first job she was offered: playing a "cat woman" in a vaudeville show. Terrified of men after her experience with Henri, she clung to the first friendly women she met: a group of well-known literary lesbians. During the next six years, she lived as mistress to the cigar-chomping Marquise de Belboeuf and published three novels. At 40, mostly recovered from Henri and somewhat disillusioned with dykes, Colette married Paris Publisher (of Le Matin) Henri de Jouvenel, and six months after the wedding gave birth to her only child, a daughter also named Colette.

In the years after World War I, Colette harvested the peculiar fruit of her bohemian years. She wrote Mitsou, Cheri and La Fin de Cheri, and in these books finally found her own voice as a writer, a voice in which masculine force was suffused with feminine tenderness, and boulevardiering decadence with a wonderful country freshness. In her 50s she extended her mastery. Her ideas, her images became ever more exact and effective. "The dog lay down with a great rumble and thump that sounded like a bag of potatoes being emptied"--"At the windows hung some nasty little curtains fit for wrapping abortions."

Forget Nothing. At 62, she made her third marriage--to Maurice Goudeket, a man 16 years younger than she. "Ah, la la!" she wrote to a friend. "A nice kettle of fish your girlfriend's in, and loving it, up to the eyes, up to the lips, and up to even further than that!"

The marriage was a great success on both sides. In her 60s, she invented an ingenious new form of fiction, part memoir and part essay. At 69, she wrote her most popular story, Gigi. At 76, she produced her finest book of essays, Le Fanal Bleu.

The last book was written under a painful burden of arthritis. What kept her going? "My gambler's spirit, my instinct for the game of life." Night after night, often all night, the aging lioness with the mad grey mane and a brow like Beethoven's sat writing under the strong blue light she loved. "Go away slowly, slowly, without tears; forget nothing! Go away adorned, and do not stop on the irresistible way, do not stop for rest except to die. And if you have, to the very end, kept in your hand the friendly hand that guides you, then lie down smiling, sleep as one privileged."

On August 3, 1954, Sidonie Gabrielle Colette, 81, slept as one privileged. With her last breath, as the light faded, she whispered: "Look!"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.