Working with Biographical Materials

Colette Inez is the daughter of a California-born Catholic priest, who was a World War I chaplain, and a French scholar, who had assisted the priest in compiling a catalog of Aristotle’s medieval manuscripts. The priest died a few years after Inez was placed in a orphanage in Brussels. Her mother left France to become an archivist at Oxford and later a teacher at various English schools. The priest wished Inez to be an American citizen and arranged for her to be adopted by a former American student. She was sent to America but became a foster child of another family instead. It was only when she learned that that family had not filed the proper papers for her citizenship that she began the research that led her to the identity of her father and mother. She subsequently came to know her mother and the members of her maternal family. It was only after her mother’s death that she was freed to disclose her relationship to the family. The story of her early years in the orphanage, her foster family, and her search for her parentage is the substance of her recently published autobiography, The Secret of M. Dulong.

While the publication of the autobiography lagged behind the death of her mother by a dozen years, when she started writing the manuscript is unknown. Such information may be forthcoming in interviews concerning the recent publication, but what can be traced is the emotion and the processing of that emotion through her poetry and the autobiography. Examination of poems treating her parentage and her early years in the orphanage collected in Getting Under Way show an interesting progression from her earliest published book of poems, The Woman Who Loved Worms, in 1972, to the poems from Family Life, published in 1988, and those new poems in the 1992 volume.

The opening poem in Getting Under Way, reprinted from The Woman Who Loved Worms, is a satiric attempt on the part of the author to treat the marginalization that she undoubtedly felt growing up as an orphan. “Orphans of All Denominations Will Meet” was apparently spawned by a sign the narrator saw in the subway announcing the meeting of orphans. The satirical poem is organized around several fictional announcements presumably spread about the world. Intertextual warnings such as “Do Not Step on the Orphans,” “Check all Orphans With the Baggageman,” and “Put an Orphan in Your Tank” follow each announcement as does the narrator’s commentary. Commentaries such as “buckle them in to dream of passage like doomed geese/ stunned with corn and gorged for the feast of the organs” suggest the rawness of the emotion that the author attempts to distance rhetorically.

The anger in this poem is followed in “A Collar Rounds My Thoughts” with her attack on her priest father. The central image is the “collar jettisoned,/ a crescent on the floor.” That collar cuts the narrator’s neck, “rounds [her] thought” and “rounds [her] world like an equator.” That same collar choked “desire in the penitent hours/ before [her] birth.” The third from this volume, “Meeting in London,” compares her mother’s abandonment to the Jews who turned their children in to the Nazis, her birth to “rifling” of a bank by “masked bandits.” Anger and hurt drip from the harshness of the imagery.

The poems that appeared in Family Life mark both a change in emotion, a growing understanding of her mother, and an artistic distancing from the early trauma of abandonment. The plight of the orphan is treated in “Without Toys at the Home” not with angry satire but with poignancy. Without dolls and toys the children are left to invent their own. For the narrator, the naming of fingers substituted for dolls, and the lines of her palms became the settings for their imaginative flights. Her “playstone” slept in an imaginative “doll’s chiffonnier.” The years have given the narrator the perspective to know that her peers have children that “have toys enough/ to break, and their children enough for quarreling.” “Escape from the Iron Gates” remembers the narrator’s wish “for a white charger . . . / fit for a lady” on which to leave the orphanage, her friend Anne’s wish is “for a donkey like the beast our Lord rode in Jerusalem.” The focus on imaginative flight has snuffed out the daily routine, the thin gruel, the single dress, and the lonely nights.

“Gascon Journey” references the parents with an image of distance rather than the immediacy and intensity of the choking collar in the earlier poem. The movement of the train calms the narrator and she imagines that the secrets of her mother and father “hummed like rails, flew through/ road beds and coupling cars,” and simply calls them “Unlikely lovers.” Going to visit her mother, she knows that “There are questions I will never ask./ There are answers she will never give.”

In “Event Horizons,” the narrator puts her own ignoble birth into the context of the births of both her parents. Her priest/father is born in the context of her grandfather who welcomes a son to carry the family name. The baby is “ignorant of boundaries and time.” The mother’s birth comes in the “aroma of lavender and mint,/ fresh linen sheets.” Her own birth, she characterizes with the mother’s prayer that the daughter “be pardoned for giving testimony/ to her intense desire.” In the fourth section of the poem the “parents have vanished/ to live elsewhere at opposite ends of continents.” The child is not told when her father dies. The poem ends with an affirmation of time and an understanding of the humanity in which the narrator was conceived and abandoned.
In a province
of lost origins where borders fold one into another
and trail off, the child I tap on the shoulder
turns to me with my own face and we know
we will escape the custody of the past,
giving astonishment a horizon line not yet
defined but waiting to be drawn.

This poem shows the seasoning of emotion and the maturity necessary to revision past into a meaningful life story.
In the new poems in Getting Under Way, the loss that will never go away even though the mother has been found and the child has been recognized is treated in “Guarding the Unrevealed,” the finest poem in the series that treats the autobiographical materials. The father is figured as red, the sun who brings the “fire in the morning” and “mourns the death of night.” The mother is figured as the moon who “mourns the death of day.” The “secret daughter” mourns the death of the mother, but she knows that the past lives within, “red, spectral, filled with convolutions/ whispers and cloudy codes.” She mourns the mother’s inability to own her before her family and before the Church and she pities the mother’s own estrangement from her own faith. The “bells summoning worshippers to Mass” were forever silent for her.

One can only conclude that the growth in depth and understanding that is voiced in the autobiography was worked out in the poetry before the biography could be written.