Biography
Article abstract: From the years before World War I until his death in 1963, Cocteau enriched the cultural life of France with his highly creative contributions to such diverse fields as literature, ballet, art, and cinema. His works express with great lucidity a pessimistic view of the world that continues to fascinate admirers of Cocteau’s films, novels, plays, and poems.
Early Life
Jean Cocteau was born on July 5, 1889, in Maisons-Laffitte, a small town outside Paris. His father, Georges, was a wealthy businessman and his mother, Eugénie, was very interested in art and music. His maternal grandfather was both an avid art collector and a respected cellist. Art and music played an integral part in Cocteau’s childhood and adolescence. After Georges Cocteau’s death in 1899, his widow Eugénie moved to Paris with her two sons, Jean and Paul, and her daughter Marthe. During his adolescence, Cocteau frequented Parisian literary salons and composed well-crafted but rather conventional poems. He was not yet an original artist.
During the years before World War I, Cocteau met the eminent Russian ballet impresario Sergey Diaghilev and the composer Igor Stravinsky. Their creative transformations of musical conventions inspired Cocteau to seek equally imaginative and disciplined ways to express his own poetic vision. Lasting friendships with such poets as Max Jacob and Guillaume Apollinaire, with painters including Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, and with the composers Darius Milhaud, Erik Satie, and Arthur Honegger encouraged Cocteau to develop profound relationships among these art forms. Cocteau produced drawings of excellent quality. He worked together with Picasso and Diaghilev on an experimental 1917 ballet entitled Parade, and he would later write the libretto for Stravinsky’s 1925 oratorio Oedipus Rex. His extended contacts with important poets, painters, and composers helped to transform Cocteau from an urbane salon poet into a creative writer.
Life’s Work
Although Cocteau did produce during the 1910’s highly imaginative books such as his 1919 volume of poetry Le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (the Cape of Good Hope), which describes the world as seen from an airplane, there was no real unity or depth in his works from this decade. He was then an extremely eclectic writer who followed whichever literary movements were popular in Paris. In 1919, however, Cocteau met Raymond Radiguet. The four years that they spent together changed permanently Cocteau’s understanding of his role as a writer. Radiguet became Cocteau’s lover, but, more important for Cocteau, Radiguet became his intellectual mentor and the only real friend whom Cocteau ever had. He persuaded Cocteau to distrust all trendy and thus ephemeral literary movements. He wanted Cocteau to create a new French classicism that would stress aesthetic distance, clarity in style and thinking, and profound analyses of human emotions. Under Radiguet’s guidance, Cocteau began to compose truly significant works such as Thomas l’imposteur (1923; Thomas the Impostor, 1925), a powerful psychological novel about an adolescent’s personal suffering during World War I. Radiguet’s death in December, 1923, of typhoid fever drove Cocteau into an extreme depression from which he never fully recovered. His acquaintances feared that Cocteau would kill himself. Louis Laloy, then director of the Monte-Carlo Opera House, believed that opium would help Cocteau. Cocteau began taking opium, and his drug addiction clearly exacerbated his emotional problems. Several times Cocteau entered drug rehabilitation programs, but his efforts never fully succeeded, largely because Cocteau enjoyed the illusory pleasures of consuming opium.
Despite his drug addiction, Cocteau remained a very prolific writer. Perhaps recalling Radiguet’s passion for the classics, Cocteau now sought inspiration more and more frequently in classical literature. Cocteau adapted classical myths to modern sensibilities....
(This entire section contains 1878 words.)
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In 1927, Cocteau completed a one-act play entitledOrphée (Orpheus, 1933). According to classical mythology, the poet Orpheus was a generous husband whose wife, Eurydice, truly loved him. Orpheus willingly risks his life in order to free Eurydice from Hades. Cocteau believed, however, that the great loss of life in World War I made it difficult for his contemporaries to identify with such an idealized representation of love. Cocteau depicts Orpheus as profoundly alienated from his insensitive and aggressive wife. His Orpheus becomes a lonely artist for whom happiness and love no longer exist. Orpheus can now use his poetic gifts only to express his deep sense of despair and frustration. Orpheus seems to express the emotional anguish and anger that Cocteau felt so acutely during the two years after Radiguet’s death.
In 1934, Cocteau would express an equally pessimistic view of the world in his play La Machine infernale (The Infernal Machine, 1936). This work portrays Oedipus and Jocasta as totally helpless victims of fate. His Jocasta is not the dignified queen of classical mythology but rather a very vulnerable woman with whom the audience can identify. Spectators come to understand that Oedipus must go blind and Jocasta must die before either can become free. Although they both acted rashly, they did not deserve such cruel treatment by the gods. Jocasta and Oedipus were alienated not only from their subjects in Thebes but also from the gods who destroyed their lives.
Although alienation would remain the dominant theme in Cocteau’s works for the last four decades of his life, he nevertheless portrayed the effects of alienation in many different ways. His 1929 novel Les Enfants terribles (Enfants Terribles, 1930; also as Children of the Game, 1955) is perhaps his most effective and yet disturbing book. Children of the Game describes four adolescents whose parents are conspicuously absent. As this novel opens, the father of Paul and Elisabeth is already dead, and their mother will soon die. No relative or social worker tries to determine if an adult is taking care of these young adolescents. Society acts irresponsibly by abandoning them. Elisabeth develops an incestuous love for her brother. She transforms their house into a terrifying fantasy world in which pseudoreligious rituals are performed. Elisabeth manipulates her sickly brother, whom she changes into a bitter and frustrated individual. Elisabeth’s cruelty toward her brother seems totally gratuitous. Love for her equals domination, but it is not clear why. Paul himself is so unbelievably submissive to his sister’s fantasies that readers feel no sympathy for him. This novel ends with two suicides. Readers have little hope that moral order can be reestablished in a society that does not protect children and adolescents from sexual and emotional exploitation.
Although Cocteau remained a prolific writer during the 1930’s and 1940’s, his works tended to become predictable. His characters were invariably frustrated and unhappy individuals who expressed a very pessimistic view of life. It is especially difficult for readers to identify with Cocteau’s female characters. A modern critic, Bettina Knapp, has suggested that Cocteau portrayed women in a consistently negative manner because “he looked upon women in general as aggressive, possessive, and jealous.” Such sexual stereotypes distort reality, but they do, unfortunately, describe quite accurately numerous female characters in Cocteau’s plays and novels. It is reasonable to conclude, as Knapp did, that Cocteau could not identify with the feelings and needs of women.
Although the quality of his literary works generally declined after the early 1930’s, Cocteau did write and direct several important films. In his 1932 art film Le Sang d’un poète (The Blood of a Poet, 1949), Cocteau used beautifully filmed images in order to suggest the many sacrifices that a poet must make for the sake of art. Charles Chaplin and many film critics praised the quality of Cocteau’s cinematography. In his 1946 film La Belle et la bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1947), Cocteau transformed this famous fairy tale into a very intimate work that evokes quite effectively the loneliness and solitude of the title characters.
In 1947, Cocteau published his masterpiece, a volume of essays entitled La Difficulté d’être (The Difficulty of Being, 1966). It is a pity that these essays have not received the critical attention that they richly deserve. As he grew older, Cocteau began to see a great similarity between himself and the French essayist Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592). Like Cocteau, Montaigne had only one true friend, Étienne de La Boétie, a writer who, like Radiguet, also died at a relatively young age. Neither Cocteau nor Montaigne ever fully recovered from the death of his friend. The Difficulty of Being imitates creatively Montaigne’s Essays and contains profound essays on themes such as friendship and death, which Montaigne had also explored. Like Montaigne, Cocteau converses with his readers in an eloquent and yet direct style.
Cocteau remained a successful and prolific writer until his death and became an important film director. He was elected to the French Academy and to the Royal Belgian Academy in 1955. He died on October 11, 1963, at his home in the French town of Milly-la-Forêt.
Summary
Jean Cocteau’s artistic development was quite extraordinary. Before he met Raymond Radiguet, Cocteau was little more than an elegant writer who explored themes and narrative techniques then popular with avant-garde French writers and artists. His writings from the 1910’s are now only of historical interest. Radiguet transformed Cocteau into a profound thinker who learned to express clearly his own perception of the world. As a mature writer, Cocteau never belonged to any literary movement such as surrealism or existentialism, but his plays such as Orpheus and The Infernal Machine did encourage an entire generation of French playwrights and theatergoers to appreciate the eternal values of classical Greek tragedies.
His was an independent voice that expressed his own understanding of the human condition. After Radiguet’s death, Cocteau developed a very pessimistic philosophy of life. His novels, plays, poems, and essays express quite clearly his intense loneliness and solitude. Although the significance of his literary works should not be underestimated, Cocteau’s most important contribution was to the cinema. His 1932 film The Blood of a Poet was the first truly successful art film and his 1945 film Beauty and the Beast revealed the universal psychological truths in this famous fairy tale. The quality of his cinematography was quite extraordinary and his films continue to enrich the lives of film viewers many years after Cocteau’s death.
Bibliography
Crosland, Margaret. Jean Cocteau. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1956. This is a very sympathetic study of Cocteau’s artistic development. Margaret Crosland analyzes especially well Cocteau’s major films The Blood of a Poet and Beauty and the Beast.
Fowlie, Wallace. Jean Cocteau: The History of a Poet’s Age. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1966. This general study defines Cocteau’s originality by comparing him to other French writers and film directors of his lifetime. Fowlie proposes a very sensible evaluation of Cocteau’s real accomplishments.
Gilson, René. Jean Cocteau. Translated by Ciba Vaughan. New York: Crown, 1969. This thoughtful analysis of Cocteau’s films also includes several insightful comments on Cocteau by actors whom he had directed in his films.
Knapp, Bettina A. Jean Cocteau. Rev. ed. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This is the best general introduction to Cocteau’s works. Bettina Knapp describes quite judiciously the nature of Radiguet’s extraordinary influence on Cocteau’s literary career.
Steegmuller, Francis. Cocteau: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1970. This is an extremely well-researched biography of Cocteau. It is a pity that his obvious disapproval of Cocteau’s homosexuality prevents Steegmuller from evaluating objectively Cocteau’s contributions to literature and the cinema.
