Textas and Attitudes, Part 8

Authors, Translators, Editors: Who’s Who?

There are two rather strange anecdotes from the late nineteenth century which put in question the nature of authorship, creative and scholarly, yet at the same time highlight the importance of approaching books from a perspective that does not necessarily begin with the so-called inviolable text.  One concerns the relationship between the French novelist Colette and her first husband Willy, the other Pierre Louys and his putative translation of the Songs of Bilitis.

We always assume there is a clear distinction between an author and those who may be called in to edit the work for publication, that though there are some grey areas, to be sure, when ghost-writers and assistants become involved, still the work of literature, for whatever it’s worth, belongs to the person named as author.  When Henry Gauthier-Villars, known as Willy, comes on the scene, everything goes haywire.  Here is a man who finagled, manipulated and obscured the playing field, so that dozens of writers were each persuaded or coerced into putting down on paper little ideas he asked them to polish up, and then sending one todbit to another for further working and so on almost ad infinitum, ended up with a full novel which he then published under his own name.  Each of the participants in this grand charade assumed that he had only done a small, almost insignificant task to help out a friend—almost no payments were made to Willy’s collaborators—and only many years later did they begin to suspect they had been, individually and collectively bamboozled.  

With his young, sweet innocent bride Colette—and this was her surname that she came to be known by, or sometimes Colette Willy—he suggested that she write down her memories of childhood in the country.  He kept locked away, supplied her with plenty of pencils and notebooks, which she dutifully filled over several years.  Willy glanced through them, hemmed and hawed, said they were interesting, asked her to go on, and then at some point saw them into print and out into the public under his name: these were the Claudine novels, known by their main character, whose fictional memoirs they purported to be.  Not until her husband left her for another woman—or actually, when he moved her out and advised her to become a music hall performer—did Gabrielle Colette realize what had happened and, more to the point, that she had talent as an author in her own right.  Michelle Sarde expounds upon this situation at length in her Colette: Free and Fettered (1978), and Colette gives her version of the business in her late autobiographical L’Etoile Vesper (1946). 

So here we are.  At what point does collaboration, editing and organization turn into a mass deception, a crime of plagiarism, a scandal of intellectual deception?  If Willy’s concocted works were of any lasting value, the implications could have been worse.  Colette eventually had the early “Willy-Claudine” books reprinted under her own name—and even went on to write more on her own.  In a sense, the whole bizarre affaire can be seen as a literary joke, with Willy finally becoming the fall guy, the one remembered for his tricks, rather than the various collaborators he duped and his wife who was thus trained and inspired by the tasks he set for her and became one of France’s most important writers of the early twentieth century.  Nevertheless, think of the aesthetic and ethical principles at stake.

Louys’ case is more intriguing and deep in implications.  It is not just that he published his own poems under the ruse that they were translations of a made-up ancient Greek poet, an associate of Lesbia, a trick he never hid from his fellow poets and which was transparent to real classical scholars, but that he added a spoof critical apparatus of introductions, notes and learned authorities that purported to integrate Bilitis both into the context of ancient literature and into the nineteenth-century debates on whether or not Lesbia was, as we think of her, a homosexual writer and the French school of thought promoted or that she was straight and an exemplar of the heterosexual, virile version of classical literature the Germans needed to bolster their own aggressive nationalism. 

Anyone with aesthetic sensibilities could have seen that Louys’s translations were filled with sensuous ideas, images and terms that belonged to fin de siècle decadence, especially the rise of lesbian writings, but the general public could be hoodwinked into believing that Bilitis was an actual female over of the famous Lesbia, and so feel that his or her modern sensibilities were similar to those of the ancient world.  Some German critics were tricked and then angry to discover the deception, taking what Louys did as an act of French perfidy against their puffed-up pretensions of classical scholarship and their nation’s pride in being heirs to ancient Greek masculinity.  

So what to us today may be watched as a good literary joke with little or no political implications may also be taken as an example of the way literature can be manipulated to serve cultural rivalries, to undermine the egotism of scholars—those who think, as many did, since I am a great expert in the ancient world who knows it all, if some new poet suddenly appears in print, then surely I already knew it—and to poke fun at the whole critical game of one-up-man-ship that lies not too far below the surface of scholarly objectivity and literary science. 

To who read The Songs of Bilitis today is to feel that these poems read like what we expect ancient literature to sound like and to enjoy twice-over the knowledge that what Louys wrote is not quite right but what is exotic and titillating to think might have or should have been.  It also piques our trust in scholarship, translation and contemporary taste itself, our own supposedly more modern views actually shaped by late nineteenth-century attitudes towards sexuality, sensuality and poetry.  We can enjoy the imitation of footnotes and introductions and at the same time laugh at ourselves for giving too much respect and trust to the editors of classical texts in translation who provide us non-experts with the illusion that we actually know what is going on.