SOURCE: Winegarten, Renee. “In Pursuit of Cocteau.” American Scholar 58, no. 3 (summer 1989): 436-43.

In general a purely poetical subject is as superior to a political one as the pure everlasting truth of nature is to party spirit.

—Goethe, May 4, 1827, quoted in Eckermann, Conversations

What to do about Jean Cocteau? What to do about the critical dilemma of the respective claims of art and politics posed by his life and his work? These questions are renewed by the publication of his diaries for 1951-53 (a belated attempt to emulate Gide's), and of his letters to his friend and onetime companion, the actor Jean Marais (Le Passé Défini, vols. 1 and 2, Gallimard; Lettres à Jean Marais, Albin Michel). It is surely time to reconsider Cocteau's position: last year marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death in October 1963; and the centenary of his birth, at Maisons-Laffitte in the environs of Paris, falls in July 1989.

Inextricably caught up in the jazzy twenties—a decade that he later came to regard as “the shirt of Nessus” from which he himself (and his reputation) could never win free—he was in many ways a product of aesthetic attitudes current during his boyhood and youth at the turn of the century, attitudes that endured at least up to 1939. All the same, he stood in the forefront of many of the innovatory tendencies that flourished in literature, music, and painting before and after the 1914-18 war. Either Cocteau was putting them into practice in his own work, often before anyone else, or he was lauding and advocating those introduced by others. Poet, critic, novelist, librettist (for ballet, opera, and oratorio), dramatist, stage designer (of sets and costumes), actor on occasion, script-writer, filmmaker, caricaturist, illustrator, painter, designer of tapestries and pottery—Jean Cocteau is, for many, altogether too much.

Add to all this the fact that, when young, Cocteau was presented to the Empress Eugénie, widow of Napoleon III, and that he first came before the public at eighteen as a protégé of the homosexual actor, Édouard de Max, the friend of Oscar Wilde. Here is Cocteau dining with Proust, and there he is collaborating with Stravinsky and Picasso (both of whom he puffed). Nor should one forget the luminaries of fashion, stage, and screen with whom he associated throughout his life. The index of any biography of Cocteau reads like a twentieth-century Who's Who.

Yet it has to be admitted that after perusing biographical accounts of this famed magician, conjurer, acrobat, whether they be sympathetic to him or denigratory, the reader scarcely feels any nearer to the heart of the subject. Denigrators—and Cocteau has never lacked for them—would say that there is no heart or unifying core in the flutterings of this butterfly. He assisted opponents by declaring notoriously in a prose poem his sense of being a leper, a zero: “My blood has turned to ink. … I have stolen his papers from a certain J. C. born at M. L. (Maisons-Laffitte) on …, dead at eighteen after a brilliant poetic career. … Let them shut me up, lynch me. Understand who may: I am a lie who always tells the truth” (his italics). What precisely does that oft-quoted admission mean? Surely it does not signify that he is a liar (though he liked to embroider the truth), but a fictionist. And is it not the actor's role, as well as the poet's, to “lie” for what he likes to consider “a higher truth”? We readily acquiesce, for our delight or illumination.

The lack of a convincing sense of identity may characterize poet, dramatist, and actor. Keats felt this when speaking of himself, the great Shakespearian actor Edmund Kean, Shakespeare, and “negative capability.” The ability to share—like Keats—in the existence of another creature, the bird that picks about the gravel, is one of the actor's talents also. With Cocteau, this is taken a step further in the idea that he has assumed the identity of another, that he is impersonating someone called Jean Cocteau (a notion encapsulated in his well-known words: “Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo”). Cocteau's story Thomas l'Imposteur, based on his own brief and idiosyncratic wartime career on the fringes of the conflict, traces the adventures of an obscure young man who, during the 1914-18 war, adopts the persona of General de Fontenoy's nephew. In keeping with the family military tradition, he volunteers to carry a message, and is gunned down by an enemy patrol: “‘A bullet,’ he said to himself. ‘I am lost if I do not pretend to be dead’” (the novelist's italics). So in the performance of his role, the youth remains consistent to the last.

What certainly functions throughout Cocteau's work, alongside the numerous legends fostered by himself, and by others associated with the overexposed “frivolous prince,” is a formidable industriousness together with a devout sense of discipline and order in art, if not in life. That high tone of devotion to art, reminiscent of Baudelaire or Flaubert, remains constant in his writings. Cocteau would later speak of his fidelity to his own path or personal line, along which he was directed by his unconscious. He began to write before the Marxian-style theory that everything is governed by politics and economics had taken hold. The artist's prime concern was beauty. As early as 1817 Keats had observed that “with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration,” though this was not his last word on the subject. The idea of “pure poetry” was in the air in France between the wars. Abbé Henri Bremond, profoundly influenced by A. C. Bradley's Oxford lectures Poetry for Poetry's Sake, upheld the notion of “la poésie pure” in the name of Baudelaire and Mallarmé. Cocteau could scarcely have been unaware of the controversy that ensued, in which ultimately the partisans of purity would be the losers.

Cocteau found a way of unifying all his diverse artistic activities by calling each one a form of poetry: somehow, this raised their tone. His numerous works are listed as “Poetry of the Novel,” “Poetry of Criticism,” “Poetry of the Theatre,” “Poetry of the Cinema,” “Poetry of the Graphic Arts.” By this nomenclature, he doubtless wished to emphasize once and for all the preeminence of poetry, and the fact that he regarded himself primarily as “the Poet,” indeed, as the heir of Baudelaire who sought to plunge into the Unknown in search of the new. Cocteau favors the image of the poet as a diver into the unknown. After rejecting his juvenilia from the canon, he composed some of the most exquisite poems in the language, poems whose rare quality inevitably eludes translation. Moreover, he went on writing poetry into old age. Yet the connecting link of poetry, chosen by himself, will not take one, perhaps, as far as the link of the theater.

For the young Klaus Mann (best remembered today for the dazzlingly free film based on his novel Mephisto, whose protagonist is modeled on the actor Gustaf Gründgens, protégé of Field Marshal Hermann Göring), Cocteau was “primarily and essentially, a performer.” The son of Thomas Mann had become friendly with Cocteau in Paris in 1926. It is ultimately as “a performer,” vulnerable, ever taking risks, acutely aware of a fickle public while professing indifference to it, yet anxious for its esteem and love, that Cocteau emerges from his multifaceted creations.

“Always hit the same spot in a different way,” he advised the dancer Caryathis, otherwise Élise, wife and muse of his friend, the novelist Marcel Jouhandeau (an unprepossessing pair). What was the same spot in Cocteau's case? It was transience and death, a theme that obsessed him, not surprisingly, since his father—later suspected of being a secret homosexual—shot himself when the boy was barely ten years old, in 1898. Nobody knew why. Although Cocteau rarely spoke of his father and, indeed, the fact of the suicide did not become public knowledge until very late in the poet's life, it seems plain that this terrible and mysterious loss dominated his imagination.

For Cocteau, death is intimately connected with speed or the ultra-rapid passage of time. During the 1914-18 war he wrote a poem in prose entitled “Visit.” It begins ominously like an opium dream: “I have some sad important news to tell you. I am dead. …” A description of the state of being dead follows: “With us, speed is much more vital than with you. I am not talking about the speed that moves from one point to another, but of the speed that does not stir, of speed itself. … Our speed is so powerful that it places us at a point of silence and monotony.” Then the dead speaker continues: “One of the earliest surprises of the adventure lies in feeling unfolded. Life only shows you a small surface of a sheet of paper folded many times over. The most superficial, freakish, crazy acts of the living are inscribed on this fragile surface. Within, mathematically, symmetry is taking shape. Death alone unfolds the sheet. …” The notion that there is a concealed mathematical order in life, rather as there is number in poetry (he uses the word chiffre, which can mean “code”), is essential to Cocteau. Access to this secret mathematical order is from time to time granted as a privilege to the poet. Images of death, of self-slaughter, the mystery of time, the secret folded beneath the visible page of life, will frequently be found throughout Cocteau's work, and conceivably they have their origin in his response to his father's mysterious suicide.

Associated with this tragic family secret, with his father's (putative) homosexuality and his own, is the theme of fate and free will. What in life is determined and what is choice? Already in his novel, Le Grand Écart (1923)—with its punning title meaning both the splits performed by the circus acrobat and, perhaps more significantly, a great distance, divergence, or deviation—Cocteau wrote: “We believe that we choose but we have no choice.” And he went on to relate there the Persian legend to become familiar a decade later through the title of John O'Hara's first novel, Appointment in Samarra: Death is surprised to encounter a gardener who is due for his quietus elsewhere, and who flees in terror to the city appointed for his demise.

At the age of fifteen, Cocteau had reputedly fled from his Parisian home and his cultivated bourgeois family. He claimed to have spent his time in Marseilles, among the sailors, the pimps and prostitutes, the bars, the opium dens, the male brothels with their transparent mirrors. Could his own bent be described as fate or choice? The most brilliant and sardonic denial of free will, adumbrated in Le Grand Écart, is exposed in his masterly play on the Oedipus legend, that tragic “farce atroce,” La Machine infernale (1934), where the diabolic gods deceive mortals with false hopes, false clues, and supreme trickery. It is as if the malignant gods themselves have written a script to which the actors have to adhere, whatever contributions they mistakenly think they are making to the plot.

That Cocteau viewed his own course in such a determinist way seems plain. Naturally, by regarding himself as a person enacting a role in a play that had already been written, he reduced the element of human responsibility in affairs. How did he come to see life in such theatrical terms?

The theater is like a (harmless?) drug, and it can even become a kind of substitute religion. Those who have not acquired the addiction or the language of faith do not know the power of the experience. Here is not another form of business enterprise or an entertainment to pass the time, but a process that reminds us how the ancient Greek theater had its origin in religion and religious ritual, and how European drama, too, sprang from medieval mystery plays performed at church. Although the modern theater has traveled far from its spiritual source, at its best it can still come trailing clouds of glory from its distant home. Cocteau knew that well enough in his attempt to revive Greek drama for modern audiences. His play, Antigone, written in 1922, preceded dramas by Gide and Giraudoux on Greek themes, and inspired those of Anouilh and Sartre. Certainly, Anouilh acknowledged his debt to the creator of Orphée.

As Cocteau himself remarked (in Opium, 1930): “This truth of the theatre is the poetry of the theatre, something more true than the truth”—by which he presumably meant the actuality of everyday commonplace or ordinary vision. That paradox of Cocteau's, the projection of a theatrical truth “more true than the truth,” which serves as a higher or more charged form of “reality,” is essential to his view of the drama, indeed, of poetry and art in general. Evidently, it has nothing to do with the kind of drama that has largely predominated in the last thirty years or so: in the work of the admirers of the nihilistic minimalism of Samuel Beckett, for instance, or in the overly didactic plays of leftist political and social commitment written under the long shadow cast by Bertolt Brecht.

Cocteau acquired his love for the stage, and everything associated with it, in early childhood. It was from watching his mother and father leave to go to the theater that he was caught: “I contracted the red and gold sickness,” he said later, an addiction to the gilt ornamentation and the crimson plush of the old Parisian theaters. As the curtain rose, he would recall “the solemn moment” of the first time. In the theater, he wrote, “I become a child whom the ticket control tribunal permits to enter Hades.” This alludes to the intimidating-looking gentlemen, seated in the foyer at a high desk, whose task it was to verify certain tickets on entry. The “tribunal,” along with the “trois coups” or three knocks that thrillingly signal the imminent raising of the curtain, heightened the atmosphere of a visit to the French theater. For Cocteau, the word tribunal itself carries sinister, commanding, mysterious associations. Such a body guards the entrance to the underworld, or to another world.

It was not only circus artistes like the clowns Footit and Chocolat that Cocteau loved as a boy, but the larger-than-life actors and actresses, or monstres sacrés, who dominated the theater of his youth: Édouard de Max; Mounet-Sully, whom he saw in Victor Hugo's Romantic melodrama, Ruy Blas (which he would later adapt for the screen); and the immortal Sarah Bernhardt. Cocteau remembered the frenzy that greeted the great tragic actress when she took her curtain calls, with her right hand resting on the frame of the proscenium arch, in an attitude of exhaustion. The great performers have always known how to prolong a performance in their manner of receiving applause. Then there was Isadora Duncan, the celebrated American dancer, tragically strangled by her long scarf that caught in the wheels of her car, who inspired the strangulation-by-scarf that Cocteau would give to his Jocaste in La Machine infernale.

Of the famed Russian dancer Nijinsky, whose decline into madness was to be equally tragic, Cocteau wrote with amazement about his extraordinary transformation on stage. Nijinsky was short, and deformed by his profession, according to Cocteau: “In brief, one could never have believed that this little balding monkey … was the idol of the public. Yet he was, and rightly so. Everything about him was arranged to appear from a distance, under the lights. On stage, his excessively broad muscles turned slender. His height increased …, and as for his face, it became radiant. Such a metamorphosis is almost unimaginable for those who have not witnessed it.” Actors, often barely recognizable in their everyday appearance, are like peacocks who only unfold their gaudy plumage on the boards, where they truly belong. Like the actor, the writer of poetry, fiction, or drama also assumes other identities and undergoes metamorphosis.

In his charming memoirs, Portraits-Souvenir (1935), which he brilliantly illustrated with his own caricatures, Cocteau tells how, in his youth, he was crazy about the theater, and that this passion was nourished at the school he attended. The headmaster was Monsieur Dietz, whose nephew, Pierre Laudenbach, would become the great stage actor Pierre Fresnay (perhaps best known to foreign film audiences in the roles of Marcel Pagnol's Marius and the seventeenth-century Saint Vincent de Paul). Of the idols of his youth, like Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Édouard de Max, Cocteau would ask rhetorically: “What had these princes of impropriety to do with propriety, with tact, with restraint, these tigers who lick themselves and yawn in front of everyone, these forces of artifice at grips with that force of nature, the public?” It is no wonder that having been dazzled by these “tigers” he should write rich parts for the monstres sacrés of his maturity: for the enchanting Elvire Popesco (who took the role of Jocaste in the revival of La Machine infernale in the fifties); for the extraordinary Yvonne de Bray; for such talented creatures of physical beauty as Edwige Feuillère, Maria Casarès, and Jean Marais.

With L'Aigle à deux têtes (1946), that attempt to bring off a Romantic melodrama after Victor Hugo, Cocteau declared that common psychology was to be replaced there by “heroic or heraldic psychology.” The two leading characters, the Queen and the Poetassassin, or twin-headed eagle, were to bear the same relation to the everyday as heraldic unicorns and lions woven in tapestry bear to real animals. “Their behaviour … would belong to the theatre just as those fabulous beasts belong to escutcheons. … To make [such a work] visible, I needed décors, costumes, Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais.” In short, Cocteau was trying to reproduce in 1946, after the intense inbred “realism” of the family imbroglio in his play. Les Parents terribles, the kind of theatrical experience that had stunned him in his youth, and that happened to accord with a certain desire for poetic remoteness in an era of drab austerity and dread revelations.

When that great Russian impresario, Diaghilev, said to Cocteau: “Astonish me!” he was only encouraging the young man to pursue his own inclinations and gifts. He was treating the poet like a premier danseur of the Ballets Russes, a Nijinsky or a Massine, as a performer who takes risks and always surprises the audience. In a sense, the artist, whether on the stage or by means of the word, does take us by surprise; and we should not think much of the theatrical performer—or the literary creator—who did not do something other than what might be generally expected. Much of Cocteau's ability to surprise lies in his often marvelous and musical use of language, in that aspect of his art which can least be conveyed in translation, with his fondness for wordplay, for startling puns (“Mirrors would do well to reflect a little more before returning images”), coupled with a compelling simplicity. The amazingly rich vocabulary that he gave to the Sphinx in La Machine infernale, as she wraps Oedipe inextricably in the mysterious coils of the word, remains one of Cocteau's most astounding theatrical achievements.

Cocteau's passion for the theater pierces through the frequent theatrical metaphors in his novels, in Thomas l'Imposteur, in Le Grand Écart, and notably in Les Enfants terribles, that strange work written in a clinic where he was undergoing one of his periodic cures as an opium addict. Paul and Elisabeth, the doomed eccentric brother and sister, in revolt against the commonplace, who live together in bizarre disorder, served as models for the young of the 1930s (including—as Gustaf Gründgens would later assure Cocteau—Klaus Mann and his sister Erika). They also prefigure the anarchical youth and the dropouts of a later era. “The performance of the bedroom began at eleven o'clock at night. Except on Sundays, there were no matinees,” we are told. None of the leading characters, not even the one who plays the spectator (Gérard) was aware of acting a part. The jinn of the room struck the three knocks that began the performance: “… the play (or bedroom if you wish) hovered on the brink of myth.” Every night they enacted the same play. In the drama of their joint suicide, wearing “the buskins of Greek actors, they depart from the hell of the Atrides,” observes the narrator in his comment on the “death song” of brother and sister. At the end, the secret room itself becomes a theater open to an audience. All these theatrical allusions occur in a novel that ostensibly has little to do with the theater as such.

Several of Cocteau's films, like a number of his plays, are rooted in the same poetry of mystery and magic—Orphée (1949) being an adaptation of his play of 1926, which in turn had employed figures and imagery from his poems. French cinema, from the days of Georges Méliès, had been enchanted with magic. Cocteau, who loved this aspect of film, once declared that no filmic trick would ever take the place of the water-pantomime in the circus that he had first seen when he was seven years old; yet Cocteau spent his time trying to prove the opposite in his movies. What was Le Sang d'un poète but a series of mysterious visual devices, a performance designed to fascinate and astonish, based on his private poetic imagery? The cinematograph, as he liked to call it, reinforced his anxiety about time: it showed that a mere difference in tempo allowed people to believe nature was serene. Films now revealed that plants gesticulate; they uncovered the secret “of a bean in process of birth, of an exploding crocus.” This concern with magic in film reached its apogee in the fairy tale La Belle et La Bête—the frightening yet serene human arms of the candelabra that project to light Beauty's path into the Beast's palace, the strange and touching sound made by the creature with his haunting eyes as he laps water. Cocteau's images remain indelibly in the memory, retaining their power to surprise and enchant at each viewing.

The difficulty of “placing” Cocteau does not become any easier with the passing of time. One obstacle is the legend he fostered while bemoaning it: the self-advertisement of his early years, neatly combined with his advertisement of the likes of Satie and Stravinsky, de Chirico and Picasso. Another is the notoriously long succession of handsome young men. Among these figured that precocious and ill-fated youth, Raymond Radiguet, author of Le Diable au corps, who (so Cocteau maintained) converted him to a neoclassical simplicity; the less talented but heroic Jean Desbordes (later tortured to death by the Gestapo); and not least, his adopted son and heir, the Yugoslav-born Edouard Dermit.

Some of Cocteau's young admirers and acolytes were said to climb the lamppost outside his residence in the rue d'Anjou, in quest of a glimpse of their idol. Others, like the outrageous Maurice Sachs, who purloined Cocteau's books and papers, followed him temporarily in his flirtation with the religious revival sponsored by the neo-Thomist philosopher Jacques Maritain—a movement qualified by a wit as “le pédérasthomisme.” Goings-on at the Hôtel Welcome, on the waterfront of the picturesque Mediterranean fishing port of Villefranche-sur-mer, frequented by Cocteau and his friends, caused eyebrows to be raised. The poet said he took to opium in his total desolation at the sudden death of Raymond Radiguet—he could not bring himself to attend the funeral—but in all likelihood he had tried opium earlier, and he went on smoking what he called his “remedy” throughout his life, sometimes falling foul of the law.

Yet despite this bohemian air of disorder and scandal, nothing seems to have deterred Cocteau from seriously pursuing his varied literary and artistic tasks with constant professional ardor. He entitled a collection of reminiscences and reflections, La Difficulté d'être, after the dying words uttered by Fontenelle in 1757, commenting that where the centenarian writer's existential disquiet surfaced only in his last hours, “Mine has always been with me.” That sense of not being at ease with himself or with life permeates Cocteau's work and, notwithstanding its surface dazzle, gives it an underlying gravity. The brevity of youth, so pertinent to his love of it, naturally exacerbates his obsession with the rapid passing of time, with mirrors that give back a declining image of the self and serve as a gateway to death.

If, for Cocteau, poetry is a kind of algebra, his idea of numerology is different from an accountant's. Do two and two make four—or twenty-two? he inquired, adding that “two chairs, two apples, do not make four.” His awareness of a subtle incongruity, of all that remains unknown, would lead him in later years to believe in flying saucers and other dubious phenomena. Cocteau was not an intellectual. At every opportunity he tended, moreover, to denigrate the intellect. To Jean-Marie Magnan he wrote in 1958: “People have lost devout respect for the oracle—for the word obtained through a kind of alchemy suited to reducing the role of the intellect and to allowing the unknown to take root in this world (the Heurtebise attempt).” This—with his emphasis—was an allusion to the guardian angel, Heurtebise, whose wings are concealed under glass sheets as carried on a glazier's back, and who figures in Cocteau's poetry and dramatic work. A year later, writing to the same correspondent, Cocteau proclaimed: “… the intellect—our worst enemy.” A purely intellectual approach to Cocteau is therefore likely to be self-defeating, and that is doubtless what some hold against him. Of course, this anti-rationalism of Cocteau's is convenient for him and can sometimes lead to nonsense (or worse) if taken to its logical conclusion. All the same, his constant reminder that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in philosophy can be a timely corrective in a materialistic, technological age.

One reason why Cocteau does not fit easily into accounts of twentieth-century literature is because he was not associated with any prevailing group. He remained aloof from movements in a country where they play an important part in cultural life. At the same time, as panegyrist or contributor, he was on the fringe of such vital and influential forces as the Ballets Russes, the new jazzy modernism, the whole mode of experimentation as opposed to tradition. The Surrealists, who represented the most powerful element in French artistic life between the wars, gave him the cold shoulder. The great panjandrum of Surrealism, André Breton, loathed homosexuality and homosexuals and was at daggers drawn with Cocteau. As for André Gide, who ruled over the dominant journal La Nouvelle Revue Française, he found devious ways to wound the younger man, despite or maybe because of their homosexual tastes. The great debate and battle of the thirties that raged between anti-Fascists and adherents of Communism on one hand, and those tempted by Fascism and Nazism on the other, apparently did not touch Cocteau, the self-engaged poet and dramatist.

Opinions generally concur that the author of Les Enfants terribles was an egoist and narcissist, absorbed with himself, his art, his love affairs, and his friends. Is there any writer of the period whose existence is so fully documented in visual images? His physical appearance was recorded in portraits by such artists as Marie Laurencin and Modigliani, in photographs by Man Ray and others. Numerous are the depictions of his beautiful hands. He would consecrate himself, his preoccupations, and his circle in his self-indulgent film Le Testament d'Orphée.

Simone de Beauvoir, much impressed when young by such Cocteau creations as the Eugènes of Le Potomak, met him for the first time not long before the liberation of Paris in 1944 and was fascinated by his dazzling virtuosity with the spoken word, by his astonishing monologue. She noted, “You realized at once that he was very concerned with himself, but this narcissism had nothing narrow about it and did not cut him off from others.” It was to her, and to Sartre, both shortly to promulgate the influential doctrine of literary commitment to the Left, that Cocteau chose to hold forth about how the Poet must keep aloof from the age and remain indifferent to all the mad acts of war and politics. This was the attitude of fin de siècle aestheticism in which he had been bred. “The lot of them get on our nerves … the Germans … the Americans …,” he complained. That remark might be regarded as the understatement of the year concerning the brutally foul activities of the Nazis in 1944. Besides, he remained somewhat less aloof from the Germans than his words might suggest.

When France was defeated by Nazi Germany in 1940, Cocteau suddenly chose to remind himself of his esteem for Briand and Caillaux, politicians who had favored Franco-German entente. It would be absurd to suggest that the poet warmed to Hitler or to his French admirers and servants. Avowedly apolitical, he was essentially an anarchist-conservative or conservative-anarchist, here as in literature. During the Occupation, supporters of the breast-beating Vichy regime actually accused Cocteau of causing the débâcle by his moral turpitude (by which they meant his homosexuality). He was attacked in the notorious collaborationist paper, Je Suis Partout, by Lucien Rebatet (though he signed the appeal for that odious writer's pardon after the war). Once, Jean Marais, Cocteau's companion at the time, went so far as to strike the critic Alain Laubreaux for his scurrilous attack on the playwright (an episode later re-created in François Truffaut's film The Last Métro). Cocteau himself was beaten up when he declined to salute the flag at a parade of French volunteers who were departing to join the German forces on the Russian front.

Along with many others during the Occupation, however, Cocteau was involved in productions of his plays and films; and while these enterprises doubtless kept his head above water, they also required the imprimatur of the Germans. Nothing could be performed or published without it. Cocteau associated with the equivocal German writer and semi-official cultural ambassador, Ernst Jünger, whom he met at the home of his old friend, the novelist and Vichyite diplomat, Paul Morand. Cocteau penned a laudatory publicity article for an exhibition of the work of Arno Breker, Hitler's favorite sculptor. The author of The Frivolous Prince did not seem to realize how such associations would compromise him, or how little they accorded with his (unsuccessful) intervention on behalf of his friend, the poet Max Jacob, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, who died in Drancy prison. After the war, Cocteau paid a social visit to Arno Breker when in Germany in 1952 for the production of his play, Bacchus, in which Gustaf Gründgens played an important role. In his diary Cocteau remarked that the sculptor had saved both Picasso and himself from the worst during the Occupation. The poet was equally grateful to his Communist colleagues, Aragon and Éluard, for protecting him at the Liberation.

Like most of the littérateurs who had not hastily joined the bandwagon of Resistance literary groups, Cocteau had to face a comité d'épuration, or purge committee, though apparently without any ill effect. He began to moan a great deal, not just about the savage settling of old scores, but about the way things were going in post-war France. It seemed to him that he had been singled out for persecution. How was it, he wondered gloomily, that Paul Claudel, the Catholic poet and dramatist, had managed to get away with turning an ode to Marshal Pétain into one to General de Gaulle? Cocteau always felt that nobody took him seriously, at his proper valuation as an artist. “There is no writer as well-known, unknown, unappreciated as I am,” he lamented. What he desired was “respectful trust” (his italics) owing to his years and his oeuvre. He wanted to know why he was left out when contemporaries like Malraux, Montherlant, Sartre, Camus, and Anouilh all received proper consideration. The repetition of this dissatisfaction becomes embarrassing in the light of the honors that were to be showered upon him, including elevation to immortality in the Académie Française. No honors could ever be enough to prove to Cocteau that he was respected and loved as he wished.

There is something disproportionate in Cocteau's single-minded concern with finding a suitable vehicle for Jean Marais, with theater production, and filmmaking at a period of universal agony. Cocteau worried profoundly about those he loved and idealized, but his imaginative embrace was not large. He lacked a sense of evil where human conduct is concerned. The enmity of fate, the often touching folly and blindness of mortals—these result in human tragedy. What of responsibility for one's sins of commission and omission? The capacity of humankind for evil is eluded, and this ultimately serves as a limiting factor in his work.

For Cocteau, all the world is a stage, and all the men and women merely players. We may well be weary of a form of drama that ostentatiously thrusts the dramatist's tender social conscience, his “revolutionary” credentials, and his (predominantly leftist) sermonizing commonplaces upon us, but are we ready today to welcome a kind of drama like Cocteau's that often feeds upon itself? Would a return to his work, as distinct from his person, contribute to the long-awaited reaction against the current fashion of what he himself called “conformist anticonformism”? Must we be forever moving up and down on the seesaw of art for art's sake or an art that is politically and socially “committed”?

The dilemma is troubling. Cocteau himself complained to Jean Marais in 1954: “What a peculiar age when politics have a hand in anything and everything!” Two years earlier, he had remarked to Marais: “Like all ages, this age is subject to the false perspectives of actuality. One must understand it and swallow the pill. I often have it stuck in my throat, but I strive to stay within my line in spite of appearances against me.” This was a respectable and once widely admired artistic standpoint, before Brecht and Sartre took command. It would be entirely admirable, if only actuality did not keep getting in the way of art and artists. As for ourselves, as readers or members of an audience, we naturally want to have it both ways. We esteem highly those fine artists who have devoted themselves single-mindedly to their art, and who have given us immense pleasure and enlightenment, but we are not at all happy if they choose a pernicious ideology or if—like Cocteau—they do not even seem to be aware that any moral choice is at stake.