PUBLISHED in 1932, Colette’s “The Pure and The Impure” is a very strange book. “Intended to increase man’s knowledge of the senses,” it is, specifically, a most sustainable plea for homosexuality ever written.

Colette’s qualification to discuss the issue is threefold: She was the leading European woman writer in the first half of this century; an enchanting story teller of amorous love and lastly, a heterosexual who had married three times.

Written when Colette was approaching 60, this small book is packed with her recollections of the “impure” personalities: hustlers, pimps, Don juans, male and female homosexuals.

Probing into a realm harshly prejudiced against before this age of sexual revolution, Colette challenged commonplace morality with an aesthetic view of life. Her tolerance of homosexuality is based on her respect for the idiosyncracy [i.e. idiosyncrasy] of any individual who fends off the world to confirm his destiny.

In her eyes, the intimacy between nature and the body is indisputable. Thus, rivetting [i.e. riveting] her famous description of nature to the human landscape, she has produced a most poetic metaphor on homosexuality:

“... What I particularly liked in the world of ‘my monsters’ (male homosexuals) ... was the atmosphere that banished women, and I called it ‘pure’ . For that matter, I would have liked as well the purity of DESERT ... which is not within the reach of every- one.

All set to praise passion, Colette invokes her platonism through the key figure of the transvestite society of her time, “La Chevaliere”, her unique beauty and personality hindered her from finding a suitable lover.

Sadly, she told Colette, “I’ve never known love except the idea of it.”

Thereby, debunking the image of homosexuals as lascivious and obscene beings, Colette procedes [i.e. proceeds] to advance her ideal for human life. Her sense of justice is unerring.

Commenting on the death of a lesbian poetess, Renee Vivien, who destroyed her lonely. life with alcohol and luxuries, Colette says:

“Like all those who never use their strength to the limit, I am hostile to those who let life burn them out.”

“I fear there is not much difference between the habit of obtaining sexual satisfaction and for instance, the cigarette habit. Smokers, male and female, inject and excuse idleness in their lives every time they light a cigar.”

Acceptance without indulgence, that’s why instinct can be pure. Though without using the term, Colette seems to be all the time referring to it in this little book — the existential “authenticity.”

Viewing life as a project, one should channel one’s energy to the most positive ends, despite the limiting conditions imposed on oneself. This moral vision transcends the boundary of sexuality.

It is part of the Colette legend that she became a writer because her libertine first husband had imprisoned her to write and publish her famous Claudine novels under his own name.

For seven years, she suffered terribly with this most disloyal husband. Jealousy, her self-acclaimed hell, is the concluding touch to her discussion of the flesh. She proclaims:

“If you succeed, as I did, in sublimating the sexual drive and putting it in the service of heaven knows what mortifying joy or egalitarian madness, you will see the furious flower of jealousy stripped of its thorns, along with the condign egotism of the human couple.”

Exemplifying her life in the quest for meaning to which nearly every serious-minded human being is doomed, Colette unveils another pure region: the artist’s desert.

She cuts across the boundary that most people pass for normality and makes life uncomfortable for every one. With “The Pure and The Impure”, Colette accedes the small group of modern masters who are destroyers of false consciousness.

How right Colette is, when she says: “This will be recognized as my best book.”

EVANS CHAN