anatole noziere Apr 2 2008, 12:27 AM


A lot of women write mostly about men. If you'll notice: What is the common subject of Romance Novels, Gothic Novels, and your daily interminable Soap Opera?--all written, and re-written, and re-re-written by women: Men. Essentially all fiction written by women is about Men; specifically, what men are, what motivates them, and how you can get one to commit (without killing you). Because the truth is, the ladies (with only one exception that I can think of--We'll get around to Colette in a minute) have not a clue; and, at the rate they go around telling one another things that ain't so about men, they never will.

They start early on their Male Myth, with their mothers, of course, to help them. Maybe the truth would be unbearable. At any rate, when at nine or ten years of age they go to their mothers and ask, "Why did Johnny punch me in the stomach?" their mothers tell them, "It's because of your Fatal Beauty, my child, etc." And that is an answer which they can understand, and which both soothes and satisfies them. Whereas Johnny's brutally factual answer (if the question were ever put to him), "To keep her from sitting next to me," would exceed both the girls' and their mothers' capacity to understand, and would in fact, in their minds, raise more questions than it answered.

As I promised, back to Colette. Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, born 1873, in saint-Sauveur-en-Puisaye, Yonne (Bourgogne) is sometimes compared to her junior by nine years English contemporary Virginia Woolf. Both were writers, both bisexual, but their differences are more marked than their resemblances. Woolf was a classically educated avant-garde, modern intellectual, experimenting with stream of consciousness, with ever a tinge of Freudianism, and is generally thought nowadays to have been bi-polar. Despite her great seriousness, she read at least three of Colette's fifty novels and liked them immensely. Colette by those standards was hardly educated at all. Though she read extensively, she was only interested in French literature, and she thought and said cruelly witty things about the prudishness and bad literary style of English Lesbo/feminists. And, what is most annoying to Woolf's partisans, Colette was an infinitely superior literary artist--with a knack for the revealing phrase that reminds one of Flaubert or du Maupassant, and a penetration into the character of things, animals, and men that has something of Balzac's plenitude and of Merimee's or Stendahl's acuity. Not surprisingly, Colette is the only woman I know of who writes convincingly and sympathetically of the characters of men.

When you ladies weary of the wives' tales your mothers and Danielle Steele, and 'All My Children,' and postmodern social constructionists have been feeding you about that mysterious Other Sex, try reading 'La Chatte,' or 'Cheri.' Keep in mind that curious, laconic phrase of Colette's "la pudeur d'homme, presque toujours plus delicate et plus sincere que [celle des femmes]," and see if you can imagine what in a man is violated by musical theater and ballroom dancing....

Those of you who read literature often, for whom it's part of your routine:

Please share with us passages from the works of female and male authors which relate to or desribe the feelings, experiences, etc. of men. We can then 'inductively', so to speak, arrive at a collective conclusion as to the truth or usefulness of the premise of anatole regarding who knows/understands men.

On April 1st, 1924, I began to serve my sentence of detention in the
Fortress of Landsberg am Lech, following the verdict of the Munich
People's Court of that time.

After years of uninterrupted labour it was now possible for the first
time to begin a work which many had asked for and which I myself felt
would be profitable for the Movement. So I decided to devote two volumes
to a description not only of the aims of our Movement but also of its
development. There is more to be learned from this than from any purely
doctrinaire treatise.

This has also given me the opportunity of describing my own development
in so far as such a description is necessary to the understanding of the
first as well as the second volume and to destroy the legendary
fabrications which the Jewish Press have circulated about me.

In this work I turn not to strangers but to those followers of the
Movement whose hearts belong to it and who wish to study it more
profoundly. I know that fewer people are won over by the written word
than by the spoken word and that every great movement on this earth owes
its growth to great speakers and not to great writers.

Nevertheless, in order to produce more equality and uniformity in the
defence of any doctrine, its fundamental principles must be committed to
writing. May these two volumes therefore serve as the building stones
which I contribute to the joint work.

The Fortress, Landsberg am Lech.

Those of you who read literature often, for whom it's part of your routine:

Please share with us passages from the works of female and male authors which relate to or desribe the feelings, experiences, etc. of men.

The final thing I read there that I found emminently interesting was the story he told of his former(?) girlfriend that insisted on a threesome with one of her friends.