Creating Colette

It's unfortunate that novelist, actress and enfant terrible Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette (1873-1954) is best known in America through the movie based on her novel Gigi. That saccharine musical rendition makes it difficult to imagine the novelist's hold on Colettolatres (as French devotees are called). This life by biographers of Proust and de Beauvoir takes the sugar out and puts the saltiness back in. Volume I traces Colette's transformation from schoolgirl to literary and theatrical star--leaving her shortly before her divorce from her infamously exploitative husband, Henri Gauthier-Villars (Willy)--and portrays an androgynous, often crude literary lioness of fin-de-siecle Paris. Indeed, the city is almost as much a part of this volume as Colette and her fictional alter ego, Claudine. And what a city it is, with Marcel Proust, Anatole France, Paul Valery, Stephane Mallarme and other articulate intellectuals etched against a backdrop of sparkling words, falling into a sea of ether, opium, wine and decadent sex. As with previous biographers Herbert Lottman and Joanna Richardson, the tone is determinedly dispassionate; the authors create their picture through the persistent, telegraphic piling on of detail: ""Colette and Willy traveled to the Riviera; Colette was booked to dance Le Faune in Monte Carlo. They spent March with Renee Vivien in her Villa Cessoles in the hills above Nice...."" The neutral narrative voice combined with the difficulty of identifying what is important in an erratic story are weaknesses, but the wealth of detail gives this the hallmark of a definitive biography. (Nov.)