SOURCE: Cismaru, Alfred. “Cocteau Revisited.”Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 40, nos. 1-2 (1986): 69-74.

[In the following essay, Cismaru provides an overview of major themes in Cocteau's work and life.]

“Lunch at Véfour with Greta Garbo. Paul-Louis brings her to my house and we all go together. What a strange thing: it seems that no one at the restaurant recognizes her. The owner and chef of Véfour, Olivier, will tell me tomorrow that someone had asked if Garbo was Madeleine Solange. And when he answered, ‘My God, no, that is Greta Garbo,’ the interlocutor had remarked: ‘I was sure she was a movie actress.’ Lost is that sense of grandeur, of the legendary, of the sacred. We are so engrossed in the secular now, so bogged down by the transitory and the derisory assailing us from all sides.”¹

This is one of the notations Jean Cocteau made in his Diary on November 29, 1951 (36-37 in French original). That he should deplore the masses' ignorance of the legendary and the sacred is, of course, understandable, for he too, and in his own eyes, belonged then, as now, to the stuff that makes for inviolate myths.

There is much talk about Cocteau now, in Paris and in many other places as well (the University of Texas in Austin, for example, had a one-week Cocteau festival in the spring of 1985). Jean Marais, his life-time friend, is dedicating a series of plays to his memory. Libération in September 1984 printed a special number hors-série quite similar to its publication of the interview with Andy Warhol: fine paper, larger-than-usual print, and colored photos depicting, alongside sober, yet quasi-reverent language, the story of the poet-playwright-film director-painter-actor and animator of so many French intellectual and artistic activities since the 1920s to the dawn of the 1960s.

An intimate friend of Picasso and Matisse, of Stravinski, discoverer of Radiguet, close associate of the Surrealists, pal of theater persons such as Barrault and Dullin, and of writers including Colette, Genet, de Beauvoir, and Sartre, Jean Cocteau was, like a lightning rod, an excellent distributor of (intellectual) electricity. In fact, it may be said without exaggeration, that he invented a lifestyle that synthesized one of the ambitions of the early twentieth century: the ability to be a voracious dilettante in such a way that no negative connotation could be ascribed to the phrase.

In the summer of 1984, Gallimard published the Diary which the writer kept from 1951 until his death. It is interesting to note that in the beginning he quotes one of his titles, Le Passé défini. Yet it is not the usual past suggested by this tense that is evoked by the special issue of Libération. Text and pictures bring strangely and tremulously to life Cocteau shaving; Cocteau smoking and holding his cigarette between his lips without ever bothering to shake off the ashes; Cocteau on one of the sets of his films; Cocteau correcting galley proofs; Cocteau at the Paris exhibition of Arno Breker (Jewish painter) in 1942 during the Nazi occupation (he was even able to navigate through it in a number of official capacities—although his more anti-Nazi friends, Sartre, de Beauvoir, and others, took him to task for it); Cocteau painting; Cocteau on his knees working on stage props for one of his plays; Cocteau teaching a company of dancers how to interpret one of his ballets: his face always wiry, his hair disorderly, in what might be called today an African hairdo, hands long and lean, with veins protruding and erect under the skin, and lips always in a smiling position, but smiling imperceptibly only, as if even the approximation of laughter was, in him, controlled by intelligence, and therefore ever so subdued.

His presence in Libération, as in other texts on and by him, transcends the pages and can be quite overwhelming. That is because his narcissism was such that it became, in fact, a springboard for the development of the self in the century's God = man idea. It is enough to recall the inventiveness with which he directed the film Le Sang d'un poète—it was in 1930—and how, in spite of the many ellipses in the narration he managed a clearly boisterous celebration of physical beauty: his own, to be sure. For the poet in the film is Cocteau himself, unabashedly revealing, indeed exposing qualities of which he is proud and which he thinks others have a right to admire and delight in. It will be easy to understand, then, to what extent Cocteau's narcissism is more than just a form of aesthetic liberation. Conventions and morality aside, in print as on the screen, the writer-director explodes his libido and invites others to do likewise. It is difficult to imagine that this is the same person who also attempted to promote Vichy's rappel à l'ordre propaganda theme.

But Cocteau did not fear contradictions, nor fatuity. A quick glance at the Diary mentioned above reveals this immediately. The first pages contain documents on the famous dispute between Cocteau and Mauriac on the former's comedy, Bacchus, which the latter found blasphemous. These documents make it clear that Cocteau was at the very antipode of any dogma. He defended with fury his freedom to write without any restrictions, as well as his artistic prerogative to delegitimize anything and anyone. Cocteau knew that art is eminently open to ostracisms. Yet, he was never afraid. He knew that castigating critics are equally open to authorial lacerations, and so he mangled Mauriac so savagely that his narcissistic id was the indisputable victor. He considered freedom of choice and scorn for stability so basic that in July 1952 he was able to state: “Without any reservations I am entirely committed to the music of Tristan and Don Giovanni, and I am moved by it just as intensely as I am touched by any little song of Edith Piaf” (81-82). Such a statement is particularly noteworthy if one recalls that, at the time, Piaf and her songs were frowned upon even by those who could not be considered purists.

Moreover, it appeared to Cocteau that his detachment and unlimited freedom persisted as he was getting older: “It is so pleasant to note,” he wrote in his Diary, “that even after going from an active to a passive stage imposed upon me by age, my mind has not lost its ability to receive and has remained porous. In short, I don't mind getting old because now I am no longer subject to positions that change too fast, nor am I so petrified that change loses its appeal altogether.” And then he goes on to opine that Mauriac's soul had been confiscated by the Church and by the Academy, and therefore his intelligence “had shed the agility necessary to survive” (101).

A case might be made by the sanctimonious that Cocteau falls under the category of the “post-modern.” If by this is suggested a wish to fuse the playwright's intuitive desire for harmony, even when stretched to the extreme of paradox, with the exercise of sarcasm immune to any braking process, the pseudo-pious might be right. But while leaving himself open to attack and enjoying it, Cocteau is still mindful of the fact that art is a vital human undertaking, and that culture is its foremost ingredient.

Post-modern or not, though, there he is telling us in his Diary about rereading Proust, from volume 16 backwards: “Proust's logic is inescapable if he is read in this anti-chronological fashion, which was in fact his own in the composition process. This method makes me understand the work more easily” (183). Upon rereading his friend, he finds that he likes the Recherche a little less than before. If there is still something that fascinates him in it, it is the author's vertices in bad taste which he handles so well, such as the description of a woman's toilette. He tells us that frescoes of this kind do not remind him of less-known painters like Constantin Guy, or Berthe Morisot, but rather the great ones like Renoir, Vuillard, and Bonnard. On the other hand, he deplores the fact that Proust seems “to lose, backstage, the narrator's own mystery,” and this Cocteau repeats on a number of occasions” (183).

There is, to be sure, some acrimony in Cocteau's reaction to the rereading of the Recherche. Personal recollections and anecdotes abound. For example, the critic tells how he disliked the fact that Proust modeled his Saint-Loup character, facial and other features, on Cocteau himself in an isolated incident: in a restaurant, drunk, brush in hand, painting chairs and tables clearly not in need of painting, to the consternation of customers and waiters. Cocteau notes: “How unpleasant it is when Proust writes of friendship, which for him had no value even though we [Cocteau and others] proved it to him every day. That also explains why, once adopted and sanctified by the Nouvelle Revue Française he abandoned old friends and sought new ones” (184). Yes, Proust was a genius, and Cocteau, far from denying it, reaffirms the fact. Nevertheless, he recognizes, upon rereading the texts, that the Recherche is nothing but a “great lesson in savoir-vivre.” And he adds: “Many times Madame de Chevigné told me: ‘Marcel badmouths me in his work. He never stepped inside any of the homes he describes. He writes of things he knows nothing about’”(185).

The same Madame de Chevigné, model for the Duchess of Guermantes, is reported by Cocteau to have responded to a question posed by one of directors of Gallimard (on the real model for Swann) in the following terms: “It was Jean. It was none other than Jean.” And Jean Cocteau comments:

It is clear that there was never any rapport between Proust's character and me. Perhaps, for him, we just happened to belong to an analogous race, but so did millions of other people. Proust was a snob. That was his flaw of character. He did not understand that all aristocrats are vulgar at all times. In his life, of course, he experienced often their vulgarity; within the shadows of his room, however, on paper, he magnified them and praised them. He made them radiant.

(191-92)

Upon reading such a generality one can conclude that, when angry, Cocteau could be a myopic critic. Still, myopia may allow for faint traces of truth, and Cocteau's intelligence made him see what most contemporary Proustian commentators had managed to hide even from themselves: namely that the author of the Recherche, in spite of his sarcastic tone, aggrandized the aristocrats; that he was not above inventing situations never witnessed; and that he was not beyond abandoning old friends for new ones when advantageous to his public and private life.

Nevertheless, it is clear that in the Cocteau-Proust relationship two narcissists clashed with each other. In part because Proust was dead at the time Cocteau wrote about him, in part because there is an obvious desire for vengeance in the author of the Diary, the cruelty of the surviving narcissist gushes forth and shocks the unsuspecting reader. Cocteau could not, did not suffer that anyone abandon him. About his relationship with Radiguet, for example, he wrote in his Diary that his friendship for him was, as all such attachments in his case, nothing but “a poet's love” (58); hence one that he did not take very seriously, and one to which others should not give much importance either. About rereading Radiguet, he notes in an August 1952 entry: “It is nice to look at his work again, but in his life he was such a madman that one could only be attracted by him. Love? I could only love wise persons” (58). And then he tells how he got Radiguet to improve the text of his Diable au corps:

This happened at Piquey, on the shores of the Arcachon river. We were staying at the hotel Chantecler, a miserable, poor man's hotel. Radiguet hated it, but I wanted him to work, so I locked him in his room. He escaped through the window. I knew he would be back as soon as he got hungry. But in the meantime I retyped all the pages he had typed because I did not think that they were worthy of him, I inserted a great number of spelling and other errors, burned the original, and so I forced him to begin once more from scratch. The text I made him rewrite was nothing but “Chinese wisdom expressed in an unbelievably dull Sorbonistic style.”

(59-60)

His love for Radiguet notwithstanding, then, Cocteau's esteem of his own opinion counted in the highest degree, and we shall never know what the original text of Le Diable au corps was like. But no matter. From the data available it must be assumed that the narcissist was right, as it must be ultimately surmised that there were very few occasions in which the public was shortchanged by Cocteau's regard for his ego. The fact is that Jean-Luc Godard was writing for many when he observed the following in 1964, on the occasion of the one-year anniversary of Cocteau's death:

Thanks to Cocteau, the Orpheus myth has been revived for all generations to come; thanks to him also, those of us who knew him learned how to look at a beautiful painting in a museum and at a beautiful woman in the subway with the same intense enthusiasm; and it is thanks to him that, in the dreary days of the Occupation, listening to the B.B.C., drinking a beer on the terrace of the Café Flore and chiding the German-catering whores on the sidewalk outside became activities that lifted the soul and made survival possible.

(6)

Examples of such testimony can be easily multiplied at present. In fact, in France and in other countries many stories and anecdotes concerning Cocteau circulate freely, to the delight of the aficionados of French letters. The vast majority of them are laudatory of their subject and bestow upon him the aura of a luminary of lasting repute. One, picked here at random, can perhaps serve best to explain the quintessential Cocteau, this enfant terrible of French artistic and literary life of the first half of the twentieth century.

It seems that, toward the end of his life, Cocteau allowed a young reporter to visit his apartment in Paris. It is a sumptuous flat, replete with priceless memorabilia: there are manuscripts by Cocteau, manuscripts by others annotated by Cocteau, books bearing Cocteau's marginal comments, drawers full of correspondence, paintings by Picasso and other famous contemporary artists, drawings by Cocteau himself, exquisite antiques of considerable value, priceless statuettes and other bric-à-brac everywhere. The journalist is duly impressed and he is ready to ask his host numberless questions concerning the details of acquisition of these objects, their monetary value, and their sentimental worth to their owner. Because he is new in his profession he is thinking that the article resulting would put him in the good graces of his editor, would perhaps even earn him a raise. But Cocteau has another appointment in a few minutes, he has no time for an interview. The reporter, then, thinks of one question that might summarize all the others he has no time to ask, an inevitable question but one also inviting an inevitable answer: “If your apartment were on fire and you could salvage only one thing on your way out, what would you take?”

Cocteau's answer: “Why, the fire, of course.”²

Notes

1. All translations in this essay are by the author of the essay.

2. This anecdote has no particular source that can be cited; it circulates among Cocteau scholars.

Works Cited

Cocteau, Jean. Journal. Paris: Gallimard, 1984.

Godard, Jean-Luc. Le Monde 5 September 1964: 6.