Close to Colette by Maurice Goudeket
GOUDEKET, Maurice. Close to Colette: An Intimate Portrait of a Woman of Genius. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1957.
First edition. With an Introduction by Harold Nicolson. Dust jacket design by Milton Glaser.
In this beautifully written book, Colette comes wonderfully alive - a woman as fascinating and courageous as any of the heroines of her famous novels. Maurice Goudeket met Colette in 1925, and they remained inseparable until the day of her death, thirty years later.
The appeal of this book is enhanced by the dust jacket designed by Milton Glaser, portraying Colette with her collection of antique paperweights. An unforgettable account of Colette and her wonderful paperweights was provided by Truman Capote, who as a young writer went to visit the Grande Mademoiselle of French letters in 1948. Capote was received by a bedridden Colette, ‘her hair a kinky spray’, and her catlike kohl-rimmed eyes ‘liquid with life, with kindness, with malice’. All around the bedroom were hundreds of marvellous crystal paperweights, which struck Truman as a ‘magical exhibition, some fragment of a dream.’ Colette gave the young American writer one of the most exquisite crystals from her collection, The White Rose, which Capote treasured as a talisman blessed by a saint. The visit to Colette is vividly told in “Unspoiled Monsters”, one of the chapters in Answered Prayers, Capote’s unfinished novel.
245 pp; b/w illus. 8vo, original quarter cloth, paper covered boards, minor rubbing to extremities. Previous owner’s name to endpaper. Very good in very good dust jacket (spine browned; spine ends professionally reinforced with archival tape).