Music-Hall Sidelights

Colette spent several years on the music-hall stage after leaving her first marriage, and this book is the record of that world seen from the inside. The title says it plainly: this is the underside of the entertainment, the part the paying audience never sees. She writes about the performers — named figures like Gonsalez, Dolly, Ida, Bastienne, and Gitanette — as workers, and the book's tenderness is for their tiredness, their small economies, and the odd intimacies of people thrown together on tour.

What keeps the sketches from sentimentality is Colette's exactness about the body at work: the cold dressing rooms, the strained muscles, the makeup and the waiting. The 'innocence' of this world, as she presents it, is not moral purity but the vulnerable candor of people whose living depends on their physical effort. The book gathers twenty-six pieces, most of them new when it appeared.

Music-Hall Sidelights belongs with The Vagabond, the novel Colette drew from the same years, and it stands as one of the early books in which her short prose found its subject and its manner. In English it was published together with Mitsou, translated by Anne-Marie Callimachi.

There is no continuous story. The book collects short pieces — sketches, scenes, and portraits — about the backstage life of the music hall: performers on tour, in dressing rooms and cheap hotels, at rehearsal and between shows. Colette draws on her own years on the stage, and the sketches follow named performers through the ordinary labor and fatigue behind the spectacle.

The unifying subject is work rather than glamour — the physical effort, precariousness, and camaraderie of people who make their living on stage. The pieces are short and exact, attentive to bodies, rooms, and the texture of touring. Twenty-six pieces make up the collection, most of them previously unpublished.