II

THE POET’S BIRTH 1889–1914

JEAN COCTEAU came from a strictly bourgeois family. Stockbrokers and admirals were in his background. Concerts were given in the home of his grandparents. His mother and father were theatre-goers. He was born in Maisons-Lafitte, not far from Paris, July 5, 1889, and he grew up in Paris, as a Parisian. His earliest memories have to do with the theatre in some form or other: with the circus, with the ice-palace and the Eldorado, where he applauded Mistinguett. There was the serious theatre too, tragedies performed at the Comédie-Française, by such renowned and histrionic actors as Mounet-Sully, de Max, Sarah Bernhardt. These were gods and goddesses, worshipped by Cocteau as monstres sacrés. At sixteen, his first volume of poems, La Lampe d’Aladin, was published. Undue attention was given it in a public reading by the actor Edouard de Max, but even at that age, Cocteau sensed the danger of such acclaim and he moved on quickly to other styles and genres. Very early he established the habit of testing a new genre immediately after completing a work.

He was first the product of those years immediately preceding the First World War, 1900-1914, years of refined artistic taste, years which were devoid of political turmoil, untroubled by any fear of invasion, save briefly in 1905. Three literary personalities, all of whom were socially engaging and histrionic—Anna de Noailles, Marcel Proust, and Maurice Barrés—were devoted to the young Cocteau. They were eminences whom he quickly made into friends. They promoted him, but he also, in the flattery and sincerity of his friendship, promoted them. Cocteau’s real exploration of the world of the theatre began when he encountered the Ballets Russes of Serge de Diaghileff and such a work as Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps, first played in May 1913. From then on, the theatre was for him that place where the acrobatic games of the circus are fused with the ritual solemnity of the catacombs.

Cocteau watched Nijinsky create most of his roles. In real life, Nijinsky appeared excessively small in stature, a monkey with an almost bald head, and with overdeveloped muscles. But on the stage, at a distance from the public that idolized him, he turned into the handsome figure of a dancer. He appeared taller and thinner than he really was. He was the type of artist who never interrupted work on his roles, who continued to perfect what the public had acclaimed as perfection. Cocteau remembered especially the endings of two ballets in which Nijinsky danced two poignant death scenes: in Pétrouchka, where the puppet grew into a human figure of great pathos, and Schéhérazade, where he thrashed about the stage like a fish on the bottom of a boat.

Not only was Cocteau one of the principal actors in the pre-war years of Paris of 1900-1914, he helped more than most in the creation of the arts which characterize that age. The theatre, in all of its forms, had become a center of social life and art. And Cocteau, even as a child, before the turn of the century, had been drawn toward what he was to call les monstres sacrés, those stars who appeared nightly, la vedette or l’étoile, each of whom was distinguished by his singularity, by his originality. Even as a youngster, at the circus, Cocteau was held by the performances of the acrobats and the tight-rope walkers, performances that seemed to him brilliant acts of defiance, vertiginous efforts to defeat death. The acrobats taught him an early lesson on the histrionics of the theatre, one expression of man’s longing to survive a perilous world.

The atmosphere of the theatre became a world for him. He cherished a cult for the heroines of the footlights, for the ceiling chandelier (le lustre), for the mysteriousness of the boxes (les loges), and for the darkness (la pénombre) spreading over the house just before the curtain and the three loud knocks (les trois coups). Every detail of a theatre production fascinated him, from the luminously painted back-drop to the women selling caramels in the intermission. In the small concert hall of the Conservatoire he listened for the first time to the music of Beethoven and Berlioz and Wagner. The real theatre, before he experienced it, he had learned to imagine and dream of, especially on those nights when his mother, before leaving for the theatre, bent over him to kiss him goodnight, and he sensed, in her elaborate dress, her jewels, feathers, and velvet, the shining lights of the theatre chandelier and the magic world of metamorphosis. In the circus he cherished the smells, above all, and the net used by acrobats, which he called no-man’s land between heaven and earth. At the Nouveau Cirque, he watched the clown Footit, with the grimace of his cruelly-reddened lips, as he enacted all alone the three characters of baby, nurse, and grande dame. Footit performed a miniature drama in which all the children present could relive the pranks of growing up and tricking adults.

About 1904, Cocteau watched the first dances imported from America, the boston and the cake-walk, and the first Negro performers, forerunners of American jazz which was to hit Paris a bit later. The elaborate skating rink called Le Palais de Glace des Champs-Elysées was another kind of theatre for Cocteau where he often observed at a table Willy and his wife who one day was to be called Colette, and Colette’s bull-dog. Cocteau claimed that Colette at that time resembled a fox in a cyclist’s costume or a fox terrier in a skirt. At five o’clock the school children were supposed to go to the dressing room, have their skates removed and be dressed and jostled and taken home by their nurses. They soon realized that the skaters who succeeded them were the cocottes of Paris, the lavishly dressed ladies of easy virtue, and actresses. Jean and his playmates would put off as long as possible the moment of their departure in order to watch the invasion of this feminine world of beauty which they sensed it would not be appropriate to discuss with their families.

The eves of a child, like the snap of a camera, register scenes very quickly, and much later the negative is developed. Cocteau, always attentive to fashion, to what was in vogue, was also attentive to that part of fashion destined to die young, and to that part which was to survive. From the arts prevalent in his early years, he was to witness the passing of Madeleine Lemaire’s painted raspberries and the speeches of Cyrano de Bergerac; and he was also to witness the survival of Cézanne’s art and the music of Pelléas. Traces of fashion and convention in his early works, became, before his death, historical elements, accepted as such. Les demoiselles du téléphone were, in 1960, creatures of another age. But their convention was necessary to the plot of his play La Voix humaine. To replace them with the dial telephone would have ruined the play. The convention was maintained, in its role of an earlier fashion, in much the same way that Madame is still maintained in a Racine tragedy.

Cocteau was a bad pupil at every lycée he attended, at Le Petit Condorcet and Le Grand Condorcet and Fénelon. He was always terrified at being called on in class, and foiled in his efforts to read and copy from his neighbor who inevitably surrounded his paper with a wall of dictionaries. His memories of school had a pivotal point, the little street, la cité Monthiers, between the rue de Clichy and the rue d’Amsterdam, close to the entrance of Le Petit Condorcet. It was the scene of the snowball fight that was celebrated in Les Enfants terribles and Le Sang d’un poète. The story of the snowball fight was true but it was enlarged into its mythic proportions by Cocteau the novelist and cinematographer. The school boy Dargelos was a real person and he bore that very name. He has now become a character in French literature, whereas nothing is known today about what became of the boy Dargelos as he grew up. All trace of him has been lost. He was the worst pupil of the class, but he held first place with the prestige of his handsomeness and strength and boldness. He charmed everyone in the school: pupils, teachers, headmaster, janitor. He was the proudest bully of the school, le coq du collège, and he initiated an inferiority complex in whomever he scorned. Years later, after Cocteau published Les Enfants terribles, the critics emphasized the fatal snowball thrown by Dargelos in the opening scene of the novel. They spoke of a stone placed in the snowball, but Cocteau always claimed that the stone was useless, that Dargelos in merely shaping the snowball with his hands, would convert snow into marble. The episode is from Cocteau’s school memories, but in its literary form, it altered the memories. And often Cocteau wondered where the real Dargelos was, in later years, stripped of his fable. Dargelos, the character created by Cocteau, became for readers of the novel, what he had been to some extent in real life in the class room, a symbol of the violence in man which society does everything in its power to tame. As a child, brought up in the wealthy cultivated world of the Paris bourgeoisie, Jean Cocteau was taken through many varied scenes and exposed to many experiences which, later in his work he recomposed and altered according to the principle of aesthetic re-creation.

The woman of Paris—la Parisienne—both the fashionably dressed woman attending the theatre, and the actress or the singer on the stage dominated, to an extraordinary degree, the early years of the century. She appeared buried under folds of silk or mousseline. And then, abruptly, a change came about, induced by such influences as Negro art, sports for women, Picasso’s paintings, a woman who resembled a man more closely, in simplicity of attire, in athletic litheness and suppleness. Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich represented the new type of woman, the new star, characterized by what the French, as well as Americans, called “sexappeal.” The music-hall singer Mistinguett was for Cocteau and his friends the new type of emancipated woman: halfvamp, half-gavroche. They watched her from their box at Eldorado and showered her with bouquets. Years afterwards, on Mistinguett’s triumphant returns to the Paris public that loved her, she would invite Cocteau to the opening performance, because he had watched her and admired her through the years. He has described the special design of eve make-up she used—called bicyclettes—a wheel effect of blue pencil lines over the eye which exaggerated the shadow of the lashes. Mistinguett’s voice became for more than a generation of Frenchmen a symbol of Paris, an almost patriotic symbol. In the roles she played, she incarnated not the various characters but herself, the woman of Paris determined to sparkle and to captivate.

One of Cocteau’s encounters with the world of the theatre was his admiration for the histrionic actor Edouard de Max, of the Comédie-Française. De Max habitually broke rules and traditions in his art, in the Racinian roles, for example, of Oreste (Andromaque) and Néron (Britannicus). Even in his apartment, which itself was a revelation to Cocteau, he played a kind of role, an emir, a big cat or a panther, stretched out on cushions and furs that seemed to come from his costume of Hippolyte (Phèdre). The apartment was a stage set, parts of which seemed to resemble Faust’s laboratory, or the dressing room of the Fratellini clowns, an apartment where volumes of Verlaine and Baudelaire were bound in such a way as to make them look like missals, where lighting came from cathedral candles, where the bathroom looked Pompeian. The legends that de Max played on the stage stimulated his infatuation with costumes and poses. He was one of the first to like the poems of Jean Cocteau, and he read them publicly at the Théâtre Fémina, where he invited the eminent actors and actresses of the day. It was a colorful beginning for the very young poet, and Cocteau had to work hard afterwards to forget this over-facile triumph.

For a brief period of time, in 1912, Cocteau lived in a wing of the Hôtel Biron, on the rue de Varenne, today the Rodin Museum. It was a large building on a park, in the center of Paris. The elegance of the building, of which Rodin occupied the central pavilion, encouraged Cocteau to compare his fate to that of Baudelaire the dandy, when he lived at the Hôtel Lauzun. Every night he noticed a lamp burning late in one window, and years later he learned that it was the lamp in the room occupied by Rodin’s secretary: Rainer Maria Rilke. When the two men became friends, Cocteau told Rilke that at the earlier time, he was so bewildered by facile success, that he could not have realized he was living beside a real genius who was at that time unknown.

La comtesse de Noailles occupies a high place among the early celebrated friends whom Cocteau has portrayed in writing. He does not speak much about her poetry, but about her beauty, the timbre of her voice, her witticisms, her capacity for speaking at great length and so engagingly, that young people would sit at her feet for long periods of time, and servants would stand in the doorway in order to listen. It was an actress’s performance—Cocteau stresses this—in the use of her hand, in the use of props: veils, scarves, necklaces, muffs, handkerchiefs. The words of Anna de Noailles enchanted everyone, and Cocteau adds that they enchanted the trees and the stars outside.

She worshipped glory and fame. Cocteau would accuse her of this weakness by saying that she wanted to become a bust in her own lifetime but with legs that would permit her to run about. (Anna, vous voulez être de votre vivant un buste, mais avec des jambes pour courir partout.) Toward the end of her life, when she heard of Cocteau’s meetings with Jacques Maritain and of his Lettre à Maritain, she quarrelled violently with him over religion. As he escaped down the stairs one day, she brandished a chair and shouted after him: “It’s quite simple. If God exists, I would be the first to have been told.” (Si Dieu existe, je serais la première à en être avertie.)

Lucien Daudet, son of Alphonse, was a close friend of Cocteau, and at the Daudets’ home, on the rue de Bellechasse, he met, among other celebrities, the literary critic of the day, Jules Lemaître. The taste, the limitations, the prejudices of Lemaître marked him as belonging to another generation. When he attempted to read Cocteau’s Potomak, he confessed he did not understand a single word. Lemaître had been one of the rare critics hostile to Rostand’s resounding success, Cyrano de Bergerac. When he had called the play le fermoir de la guirlande de Julie (the metal clasp on a volume of 17th century “precious” poetry), he estranged Rostand. Mme de Noailles tried to bring about a reconciliation by inviting both men to a dinner party in a restaurant at the Place de la Bastille. Cocteau was present and has recorded the manner in which Edmond Rostand charmed everyone including Lemaître. When Rostand’s monocle fell, the waiter and the lady cashier rushed to pick up the pieces to keep as souvenirs of the great man. Lemaître became angrily irritated as he watched Rostand take out from his pocket another monocle and offer it to the cashier, and then take out a third monocle which he carefully placed over his eye. On burning a hole in the table cloth with his cigarette, Rostand exaggerated his remorse by asking what he could do to repair the damage and Lemaître retorted: “Why don’t you just sign the hole?”