IX

THE POET AS THEORIST AND CHRONICLER

TO WRITE in any form would seem to have been for Cocteau an exercise in critical taste. When the topic was given him, or chosen by him, it would immediately turn into a means of excitement and stimulation. The discussion would begin at once and he would inevitably reach a new discovery of himself and formulate a new accomplishment of his mind. All of Cocteau’s work can justifiably be called “a poetry of criticism,” because in it he gives himself over without effort to the delights of judging, to the enjoyment of a game of ideas which forms the basis of criticism. Cocteau is one of those French writers—novelists, poets, dramatists—who are critics, and among the finest that France has produced, critics not only in their critical essays but also in their creative works: Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Gide, Valéry. In the realm of aesthetics, Cocteau’s Rappel à l’ordre has its place beside Baudelaire’s Ari romantique and Gide’s Prétextes. In the realm of ethics, Cocteau’s La Difficulté d’être ranks easily with La Bruyère’s Caractères, with Joubert, and with the best pages in Julien Green’s Journal.

In the most natural way possible, a critical position is taken by Cocteau when he writes. His Antigone, for example, is a criticism of Sophocles; his Plain-Chant is a criticism of traditional love poetry; his Secret professionnel is a criticism of criticism. His method is always a simplification of some artform, of some artifice that needs to be recast. The measurements have to be changed, the exaggerations restricted, and the implications deepened. If the point of departure is common sense or something reasonable, Cocteau may well add to it a twist of singularity or of insolence. To a theme of innocence he may add a pose of studied indifference, of detachment. The slow tempo of wisdom will be speeded up, even indiscreetly. The treatise that normally would be heavy and cumbersome, Cocteau will compress into startling affirmations without proof, without research. He refuses to be commentator or exegete. He does not even tolerate the rational steps of his own mind. In real life he was a tireless speaker, but when he wrote, he was always laconic, cuttingly brief. He wrote in flashes and aphorisms. This was his style. He had learned to stop writing when he had articulated what he wanted to say.

In answering the question: What is style? Cocteau said on one occasion that for most people, it is a complicated way of saying very simple things, but that for him it is a very simple way of saying complicated things: une façon très simple de dire des choses compliquées. Cocteau understood the deep simplicity of commonplaces and trained his talent in restâting them in new guises for a new age. He often conjugates old bits of wisdom of the race with well-worn commonplaces, so that together they appear as two opposing principles. His aphorisms are dramatic. They are often miniature plays destined to be seen on a stage by a public who expects some visible conflict. With words, Cocteau is a stage director carefully placing his actors in strategic positions.

Cocteau recapitulates many of the romantic views concerning the poet: he is an inspired figure, alone, aloof, outcast. But he believes poetry needs the full intelligence of this man. To reach Cocteau’s ideal of very simple and very bare poetry, he has to use props and machines which are sometimes called tricks of witchcraft. To be pure despite all the traps of words and rhetoric demands the skill of a magician. His facile use of puns, in prose and verse alike, is one way of demonstrating the critic’s skill in reducing words to a form capable of carrying a thought. His own name designates the “rooster early” (coq tôt) singing before daybreak.

The critic by profession as well as by nature is the analyst of a work, the interpreter of a work, and for this kind of writing he uses his memory, his thoughts concerning all the books he had known. Cocteau’s attitude toward criticism is radically different from this. His memories are called into play, inevitably, but he is never the analyst of his memories or of a work of art. He is a spectator. Astonished, innocent, serious, he watches the spectacle of his memories and speaks of them as if they were performing for him an action of which he cannot tell the ending. There is no way of judging that which has no conclusion.

Rather than resolving riddles, Cocteau turned into the sphinx of his age. He writes as if he inhabits a zone where all is truth, where there is no need for argumentation, no need for weighing judgments, no need for even referring to disorder because the new order of the twentieth century had been sensed and proclaimed by Apollinaire in the early years. When Cocteau himself denounced the facile bavardage of his earliest writings, he began his own adventure with order, which he was to call “poetry” and which was an acceptance of some inner personal illumination. Others have called it, in referring to Cocteau, a mask, an affectation, a trick. It does often resemble a dangerous exhibitionism, a tightrope stunt, in full view of the spectators who watch hypnotized by the performance when there is every chance for catastrophe.

In the early years, in the twenties, the public watched Cocteau only when the fanfare was strident. They quickly turned away when each performance ended. Then during the years that immediately followed the Second World War, in the late forties and early fifties, after the death of Valéry, when Claudel and Gide published their correspondence, when Sartre and Camus were denouncing the world’s absurdity, when Picasso began working in porcelain, the works of Jean Cocteau continued to appear. He was still there, and the new works, while fully recognizable, were reaching a fuller dimension of thoughtfulness and wisdom. His place had to be acknowledged with the appearance in 1946 of La Difficulté d’etre, and, in 1952, of Journal d’un inconnu. These two books, of a critical nature, were not only the most profound of Cocteau’s work, but took their place among the really significant books of the age.

In the refining of his method of writing, which is also his method of criticism, Cocteau acknowledged on several occasions his masters. In the final editing of a film Chaplin explained to Cocteau that he used to shake the tree so that only what was firmly attached to the branches would remain. Satie he used to call his schoolmaster, and Radiguet his examiner. Both of these men, one much older than Cocteau, and the other much younger, helped him to reach the swiftness and simplicity of his writing. They taught him how important it was to forget he was a poet and to allow the phenomenon of creation to take place without his realizing it.

The critic’s method is identical with the poet’s, in a fundamental sense for Cocteau. Whereas the more typical poet tends to hide the object under the poetry, and the critic tends to hide the subject of his criticism under the jargon and the system of his criticism, Cocteau does the reverse: he hides the poetry under the object, and he hides the method of criticism under the subject of the criticism. It is sometimes difficult to remember that under the arch-simplicity of one of his poems, the major themes of love and death are present. And likewise, it is not always apparent, on a first reading of a paragraph of his criticism, that he is claiming for the powers of art and morality more than is usually claimed in our day. As a pharmacist mixes herbs to make a cure, as a painter mixes colors to make a picture, so Cocteau mixes proper names (Antigone, Oedipus) to make a play, and concepts to reveal the hidden resources of the artists of his day.

Cocteau’s first critical writing, Le Coq et l’Arlequin, was published in 1918, in les éditions de la Sirène, which he had founded with Blaise Cendrars. It is a kind of manifesto in favor of the new music of Satie and Stravinsky, and an attack on the music of Wagner and Debussy. The work, written in brief aphoristic sentences, is fundamentally a defense of Parade, and the aesthetics of simplicity in the music of Erik Satie. It initiated a polemic between Cocteau and Gide, which appeared in part on the pages of La Nouvelle Revue Française, and it was widely discussed in the cafés.

In his dedicatory letter to Georges Auric, Cocteau explains that he admires the Harlequins of Cézanne and Picasso, but he does not like Harlequin. Harlequin denies his master at the crowing of the cock. He is a night cock who says “Cocteau” twice and lives on his own farm. After the vogue of Wagner and Debussy, Satie taught the boldest lesson to his age: the lesson of simplicity. The aesthetics of Le Coq et l’Arlequin is a series of formulas designed to reinforce this claim. Satie enseigne la plus grande audace à notre époque: être simple.

At this time, in an underground café (une cave) on the rue Huyghens, a medley of artists and society people crowded about every evening to hear the new music of Les Six (Georges Auric, Arthur Honegger, Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Germaine Taillefer, and Louis Durey), and to hear new poems of Cocteau, Apollinaire, Max Jacob, and Pierre Reverdy.

During the months when the Dada movement was showing its principal manifestations in Paris, Cocteau was publishing a series of articles in the newspaper Paris-Midi between March 31, 1919 and August 11. The majority of these pieces, ultimately published in book form under the title Carte Blanche, were devoted to extolling the new music and new poetry. The articles form the literary and artistic chronicle of the day, in which Cocteau discusses the “futurism” of Marinetti; the musical setting of Louis Durey to Les Images à Crusoé of Saint Léger-Léger (Saint-John Perse); an exhibit of paintings of Juan Gris, un Espagnol qui habite Paris; the histrionic art of Charlie Chaplin and Mistinguett; the key position of Satie in the new music (Satie joue le rôle de poteau indicateur. La jeunesse consulte la flèche); the kind of dancing visible in les bals musette; a pene^frating assessment of Max Jacob to whom, according to Cocteau, all the Paris artists and writers owe something (nous lui devons tous quelque chose); the new exoticism realized by Blaise Cendrars in such a work as La Prose du Transsibérien, the intoxicated train, coming after the drunken boat (Train saoûl après Le Bateau ivre).

In 1922, in company with Radiguet, at Le Piquet, on the bay of Arcachon, Cocteau wrote Le Secret professionnel, one of the significant critical-theoretical texts of the period. It is a poetics, a treatise on the need for simplicity in the arts of poetry and the theatre. The example of Radiguet’s kind of writing and of Radiguet’s theory were unquestionably incorporated in Le Secret professionnel. Cocteau is less concerned with technical problems of aesthetics than with the moral values involved in the writing of poetry. The notion of poetry involves a commitment of the poet’s entire being. At the beginning of the essay, Flaubert is discussed as the type of writer who holds his gun for a long time in the position of firing, and who is not concerned with the target. Cocteau claims that the so-called realistic tableaux of Flaubert are far from reality. Cocteau distrusts a learned art of verbal combinations and all the noble attitudes of poets when they speak of revolt and blasphemy. Whenever anarchy becomes official or whenever suffering is presented as triumphant, Cocteau is wary.

He is searching for another principle in art and he gives to this principle the name angelism. Several terms are used for its definition, and they are presented with their opposites, so that one cancels out the other: disinterestedness and egoism, pity and cruelty, a liking for earthly pleasures and a scorn for them. By this coupling of contradictions, the divine is discovered in a human being, and such a being, in his naive amorality, will appear suspect to most. By the title “professional secret,” Cocteau is saying that a poet uses a certain number of secrets in his poetry, and the art of poetry is such that these secrets are not revealed, that the poet is not dispossessed of them. He practices with them, because poetry is more profoundly a state of being than merely an art of writing.

Cocteau denounces the pessimism and the spirit of destructiveness he finds in romanticism and in the romantic’s taste for ruins. On defining the signs of angelism he finds in modern poetry, he names Rimbaud the leading exponent, who combines the extremes of disinterestedness and egoism: Jusqu’à nouvel ordre, Arthur Rimbaud reste le type de l’ange sur terre. A passage in the center of the essay defines poetry in a way closely allied to the surrealist method. It is poetry seen in its role of revealer, of unveiler, when abruptly it is able to name a familiar object that had been accepted mechanically and that is seen in a new light dispelling the torpor with which it is usually surrounded. This is for Cocteau the creation of poetry. Elle dévoile, dans toute la force du terme.

Cocteau claims he has no knowledge about poetry’s power to unite man with religion or separate him from it. He comments on Claudel’s famous sentence in his preface to the works of Rimbaud which calls the poet a mystic in a barbaric state: Rimbaud était un mystique à l’état sauvage. This he accepts: that poetry is a religious spirit outside of any specific religion. What does the poet believe? questions Cocteau. He believes everything. Skepticism is a poor conductor for poetry, and that is why France, as a country, according to Cocteau, is not very receptive to poetry. C’est pourquoi la poésie touche peu en France, pays malin.

In a lecture given at the Collège de France, on May 3, 1923, Cocteau pays special homage to those artists he calls his masters. D’un ordre considéré comme une anarchie is in many ways the writer’s self-evaluation, an analysis of his previous work, of the changes that had taken place in his tastes, and of his admiration for several contemporary artists. He names Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont as the immediate precursors of his generation. The symbol of night, so often associated with their work, Cocteau claims is a false type of darkness (ténèbres fausses). Their “night” is so concentrated that it appears finally with the luminosity of a diamond.

He names quite simply the two men to whom he owes the most: Je cite mes maîtres: Erik Satie et Picasso. The composer and the painter taught Cocteau the significant discipline of freedom. When accused of constantly changing their style, of not knowing where they were going, Satie and Picasso would reply that all great artists are amateurs. The birth of a very clear, very simple work is usually not recognized. Cocteau and those writers just slightly older than himself, such as Max Jacob and Apollinaire, were hostile to the inflated art of the nineteenth century. They were unwilling to repeat the rhetorical devices of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and Lautréamont. The new writers of 1920: Jacob, Cocteau, Paul Morand; and the new composers: Milhaud, Auric, and Satie, disliked what Cocteau called in his lecture “family dinners” or new artistic schools. Haissons les dîners de famille, les systèmes. Picasso is not a cubist, he would say. And Mallarmé was not a Mallarmist. Any preconceived notion about poetry and music is grotesque.

In 1928, these separate essays were collected by Cocteau into one volume which he called Le Rappel à l’ordre. He included three short texts: Visites à Maurice Barrés, an account of his meetings with Barrés during the war; Autour de “Thomas l’imposteur”, a critique of his novel which had appeared in Les Nouvelles Littéraires, October 27, 1923, in which he analyzes the anti-bizarrerie of his work; and Picasso, an important essay on the painter, which had first appeared in 1923. In his analysis of the qualities of economy and clairvoyance in Picasso’s art, Cocteau restates his aesthetic position that dominates all the writings collected in Le Rappel à l’ordre. It is a midway position, classical in its opposition to the verbal anarchy of a Rimbaud and Jarry, and avant-garde in its design to shock and startle spectators and readers. The aesthetics of Le Coq et l’Arlequin is a crusade against the obscurity, the “fuzziness” of certain nineteenth-century artists, against an over-facile use of the tradition of the poètes maudits. The problems of talent and genius are studied as values in Le Rappel à l’ordre. These early essays are exercises in style and articulation of thought, as well as statements of belief of an apprentice who had rapidly become professional. The themes of the essays are so intertwined one with the other that it is difficult to follow in them an “order” in the usual sense of the word. The thesis of the work might be defined as the danger of ornamentation; for a writer, the danger of any development or prolongation once the trouvaille is discovered. One striking, swift metaphor is sufficient to bear the burden of a thought. Cocteau’s own art, of course, best illustrates such a thesis.

The moral importance of Cocteau’s work, and especially of his critical writing, was first revealed in Lettre à Jacques Maritain. This was published in 1926 immediately after three theatrical works: Orphée and the two adaptations of Antigone and Roméo et Juliette. The friendship of Maritain was a consolation for Cocteau at a very difficult and even tragic moment in his life. It helped to initiate not a new attitude toward art, but a more carefully defined attitude toward art.

Lettre à Maritain is a summary of many matters in Cocteau’s life and career, of subjects he had discussed in earlier writings and which now are reviewed and analyzed in the light of his friendship with Jacques Maritain and Père Charles, the priest he had met at Maritain’s house in Meudon. It had become clear to him that the fundamental seriousness of art has a religious explanation. He had always been distrustful of miracles and mysticism. The aesthetics of his art, or at least aspects of this aesthetics appeared to have religious connotations, and terms he had always used had suddenly taken on a purer meaning. He writes of “the algebra of love in what remains of our faith” and the “melody of silence in the Virgin.”

The basic method used in his art now seems to be sincerity, an almost religious need to tell everything, to expose everything, to live naked. He speaks of seven friends who had been taken from him by death (Garros and Radiguet were among them) and he now sees these losses in a different way. God had not really taken these young people away. He had simply put costumes on angels. The image of “gloves of heaven” (gants du ciel) is here used by Cocteau to define the kind of artist he considers Raymond Radiguet. To touch us without soiling itself, Heaven puts on gloves. When Heaven takes its hand out of the glove, death occurs. Lorsque le ciel ôte sa main, c’est la mort.

The Lettre contains personal confidences, such as the effeet of Père Charles on Cocteau, a brief history of the development of the arts in Paris between 1918 and 1923, and several aphorisms on art and specific artists which recapitulate and sometimes clarify earlier formulas of Cocteau. He emphasizes the belief that the new language of poetry must be liberated from the style of Rimbaud and the “superstitions” of Maldoror. If Cocteau is in the process of learning that art is religious, he is also determined to point out the danger of religious art.

The image of the tightrope had been used by Cocteau to describe his form of classicism and he revives it in Lettre à Maritain in order to point out the relationship between his aesthetics of simplicity and Catholicism. Both the aesthetics and the religion are his own. It is incorrect to speak of “conversion” in Cocteau’s case. La ærde raide me mène au catholicisme; c’est-à-dire chez moi; il est donc faux de parler de conversion.

The volume Opium, with the subtitle, journal d’une désintoxication, was published in 1930 with several drawings by Cocteau. It is quite literally a diary written and drawn by Cocteau in the clinic of Saint Cloud, between December 1928 and April 1929, while he was being treated for an addiction to opium. Some notations were added to the galley proofs in 1930. The phases of the cure are described as well as the effects of the use of the drug. Opium had quite literally excluded Cocteau from its rites.

The diary of the cure is almost the pretext for commentary on many other subjects, including some of Cocteau’s own books: Les Enfants terribles, for example, whose subject forced itself on him while he was at the clinic, and which he wrote during three weeks. He claims the book wrote itself and that he was the scribe. The physical suffering endured by Cocteau during the treatment is graphically transcribed in the drawings far more than it is described in the text. The style of the writing is as concise as ever and the thoughts are as aphoristically expressed as always. Cocteau’s writing is always a form of ascesis, but because of the subject matter of Opium, it is here blatantly a rite of purification, a cure of the body and spirit. He is not concerned with describing a sensory paradise, but with measuring the degree of lucidity his mind had reached. The brief notations in Opium, which are often observations of reality and aesthetic principles and moral comments, will be expanded into paragraphs and chapters in subsequent volumes, in two especially: La Difficuité d’être and Journal d’un inconnu. The moralist in Cocteau, in 1929, is still tentative. He is still close to the effort he made to escape from himself and from his sufferings.

The man who writes and who suffers as he writes, as in Opium, is undertaking the task of going against himself. He is instituting a lawsuit against opium because he claims he does not belong to it. Jean Cocteau is free and intends to remain so. No one world, no one artificial paradise can hold him. No one adventure is exclusive or definitive. The writing of Opium was one of the means of curing himself of the addiction. By writing about the art of writing, and the agility of the human spirit, and the essence of art, Cocteau moved out of the immediate past which had threatened to hold him down, and into a period of marked fertility.

The volume Essai de critique indirecte, published in 1932, is in two parts, of which the first, Le mystère laic, had appeared in 1928, and of which the second, Des beaux-arts considérés comme un assassinat, is concerned with the paintings of Giorgio di Chirico. But every announced subject is a pretext for other subjects, for other diversions. By reflecting on one object foreign to one’s mind, one discovers the realities and the passions of one’s mind. The “secular mystery” in le mystère laic is that art which is foreign to religious dogma, but it turns out that le mystère laic is essentially spiritual.

Essai de critique indirecte is a confirmation, ten years later, of the aesthetics of Le Rappel de l’ordre, but the tone of the book and the atmosphere around it have changed. The form of the aphorisms is more tormented, more anguished. The “assassination” in the title of the second essay refers to a principle allied to the catharsis of Aristotle. Every work of art is the quelling or the death of an original impulse in the artist. But his genius, if that is what he has, will work for new victims to bring about his rebirth.

To the ethical in a work of art, Cocteau ascribes a higher place than to the purely aesthetic. The artist cannot renew his work without living dangerously and hence calling forth slander. J’estime que l’art reflète la morale et qu’on ne peut se renouveler sans mener une vie dangereuse et donnant prise à la médisance. This point separates Cocteau from Maritain, who believes art to be a dangerous game, a caricature of creation, and who believes morality stable.

This age is one of “mystery,” acccording to Cocteau, and the poet is the one on whom the unknown falls. More forcibly than in earlier writings Cocteau calls poetry a calamity of birth (une calamité de naissance). A great artist is inhuman, and when he speaks, what he says is upsetting to his age. A poem is a closed world totally hostile to the casual visitor. Cocteau looks on the paintings of Chirico in the same way. The streets in the paintings do not invite the spectators. It is as if they bore the sign one way.

More than being a commentary on the art of Chirico, Le mystère laïc is a poetics, or at least Cocteau’s writing which comes closest to being a poetics. Chirico chooses familiar objects for his paintings, but places them in such unusual juxtapositions that they translate, with the precision of poetry (la poésie, c’est l’exactitude), the spiritual anguish of man, the darkness of his inner life. Pervading l’essai is a deeper sense of anxiety than in other writings of Cocteau. In losing the sense of mystery, modern man has upset the economy of the world. In today’s world everything has to be explained. The police question and observe from the outside all the family secrets. That is why everything in the paintings of Chirico (and everything in the poems of Jacob and Cocteau): walls, arcades, shadows, equestrian statues, an egg placed in a desert, a rubber glove hanging near a plaster head, will seem suspect.

Cocteau argues that every masterpiece is made up of mysteries, of disguised confessions, calculations, puns. He cites Da Vinci and Watteau, whose secrets are carefully concealed: un Léonard, un Watteau, deux cachottiers connus. Chirico is the decorator of theatrical peripeteia. Only a small number of his spectators know what they are looking at.

The articles included in Portraits-souvenir (1900-1914) were written at the beginning of 1935 for the Saturday edition of Le Figaro, and they were intended to reveal the personal life of Cocteau and the artistic life of Paris between 1900 and 1914. The memories narrated are of childhood and adolescence. They center on the theatre, on friendships, on early experiences of the heart and mind. The twenty-six articles are brilliantly evocative. They are notes for an autobiography, selected memories that describe Paris at the turn of the century and that explain elements of Cocteau’s portrait: the social world from which he came, his early attachment to the theatre, his interest in music, the importance of Dargelos in his life, his friendship with Rilke, with Christian Bérard, and the place in his memories of Villefranche and the Hôtel Welcome.

The articles resemble drawings from memory. Despite the number of years that have elapsed between the time of the activities and the writing of Portraits-souvenir, there is no sadness in the evocation. Cocteau appears as he must have appeared to many of those described in the book, as a Prince Charming. Effortlessly, as if by magic, the past is brought back. The circus, the school friends, the apparition of Mistinguett on the stage, the portraits of Catulle Mendès and Rostand, and especially the study of Anna de Noailles are clear transcriptions of the past into the present. Cocteau has the skill of enlarging what he wants to enlarge, but without deforming. Each scene has its own value, and a place in the background of the writer.

Portraits-souvenir was a voyage into the past, to certain cherished landscapes of the past, and Mon premier voyage (Tour du monde en 80 jours), of 1936, is the account of a real journey, undertaken as a wager with the newspaper Paris-Soir. Cocteau left on March 28, 1936, and returned to Paris, June 17, after following the itinerary of Philéas Fogg, the character of Jules Verne. Cocteau adhered to the traditions of journalism in the swiftness with which he narrated his voyage, in the directness of his observations. André Gide, an accomplished traveler, had once accused Cocteau of not being able to observe the exterior world and describe it. Mon premier voyage is dedicated to Gide, and is a denial of the accusation. On the third page of his notebook, Cocteau acknowledges that he has been wandering through centuries not inscribed on maps and that from these worlds without atlas, he had brought back experiences that had not always pleased his readers. He had colonized unknown regions. And now he was ready to rest and wander over real land and take railroads and boats like everyone else. He compared the road he took to a serpent entwined around the globe. The head and the tail were in Paris.

If the book is a faithful mirror of things seen, it is also a mirror of the traveler in Rome, the heavy city (ville lourde); on the Acropolis; in a café in Alexandria; before the sphinx; in Singapore; at a meeting with Charlie Chaplin on May 11 (le miracle charmant de ce voyage) on the boat between Hong-Kong and Shanghai. This chance encounter with Chaplin and Paulette Goddard gave Cocteau the greatest joy of the voyage. He did not speak English, and Chaplin spoke no French. Yet they spoke effortlessly. Je ne parle pas anglais. Chaplin ne parle pas français. Et nous parlons sans le moindre effort. Chaplin called himself the most exposed man in the world because he works in the street. “The aesthetics of the kick in the behind. . . . And now I am beginning to receive it.”

In New York, Cocteau observed the Lindy Hop in Harlem, listened to swing music, watched a performance of Macbeth played by Negro actors, visited Coney Island. Despite the speed of the journey, and the constantly changing scenes, Mon premier voyage does not have a surface brilliance. The commentaries are on significant representative details, on the enigmas of civilizations, on secrets of races and customs. The moral reflection always accompanies the description. The principal observed in Essai de critique indirecte is applied to the living in Mon premier voyage.

Maalesh, journal d’une tournée de théâtre, of 1949, is another kind of diary, begun on February 20, 1949, at the death of Christian Bérard. On the sixth of March, Cocteau left France by plane, with a company of twenty-two actors to put on a series of plays in Cairo, Alexandria, Istanbul, and Ankara. Among the actors were Yvonne de Bray, Jean Marais, Gabrielle Dorziat, Tania Balachova. They performed three plays of Cocteau: La Machine infernale, Les Monstres sacrés, and Les Parents terribles. The repertory also included Britannicus of Racine, Huis clos of Sartre, Leocadia of Anouilh, and a Feydeau play: Léonie est en avance. In his journal, Cocteau notes his impression of places, of people he encounters, of the performances of his actors, of the audiences who come to see the plays, of his cohabitation with the actors. He lectures often as a cultural ambassador from France. The diary narrates three months of wanderings in Egypt, Turkey, and Greece. Cocteau describes work in the theatre, official receptions, physical fatigue. Some of the passages concerning Egypt and Greece are developments of notes first taken in Mon premier voyage. Temples and tombs are sites where Cocteau feels especially in accord with the past. The work of excavators and achaeologists revealing settings for extraordinary spectacles of the past is curiously related to the performances of the French actors whom Cocteau was guiding. Life in the present with its activities, schedules, and risks is not more intense than life in the past of Istanbul, when it is evoked by Cocteau.

Even more than the journal of his voyage around the world and the journal of the theatrical tour of Maalesh, Cocteau’s journal of his film, La Belle et la bête, describes his exceptional capacity for work, his will to overcome all the obstacles that are concomitant with work in the theatre and with the production of films. La Belle et la bête, journal d’un film, of 1946, is the account of the shooting of the film in 1945, where the endless technical problems are analyzed as they arose each day, and all the intimate reactions of Cocteau to these problems and to the idea of the film as a whole. Work devoured Cocteau to such an extent that he appeared to use it as a means of escape from the pain of living. He welcomed the purely manual aspect of film making in order to move out from the fearsome void of a life that had no physically exhausting exercise. The skin disease from which Cocteau suffered during the film production is analyzed as carefully as the labor on the film. The physical pain is not unrelated to the technical labor of the film shooting. He struggled to keep alive as he struggled to create the film.

No one term is adequate to describe the type of essay found in La Difficulté d’être, a collection of brief essays on moral and aesthetic themes. There are passages of confession in this volume of 1947, where Cocteau speaks intimately to his reader; there are portraits of friends and important celebrities who had heen carefully observed by Cocteau; there are reminiscences of events and encounters; and there are, more numerous than in other volumes, reflections on moral issues which give to the volume as a whole an unusual gravity. La Difficulté d’être seems almost to be a final communication to all those interested in the career of Cocteau, an attempt to justify a life that had appeared enigmatic and even scandalous. It is the analysis of a man’s mind when he wants to share the best of his thought with his friends.

The title comes from Fontenelle who, almost one hundred years old and close to death, said to his physician who had just asked him how he felt: “I feel well, but I do feel some difficulty in being.” (Bien. J’éprouve seulement une certaine difficulté d’être.) The repertory of all of Cocteau’s themes is here in this book, but they are more profoundly articulated, as if death were felt to be imminent, as if this moment were the last chance to mirror himself, to consider his varied activities, his rich friendships, his obsessions, and the problems that no man can solve but which form a persistent part of life, and which, when all is said, when the end is near, may be seen to be extraordinary privileges.

The portraits are additions to some included in earlier books: Radiguet, Nijinsky, and Diaghileff. As an aesthetician he speaks of beauty, of the theatre, of words, and of readings (De la beauté, Du théâtre, Des mots, De la lecture). There are familiar essays about himself and about places where he lived: De mon enfance, Du travail et de la légende, De mon physique, De mes évasions, De la France, Des maisons hantées, Du Palais-Royal. But the most precious essays of the book are those in which Cocteau writes as a moralist, in which the seriousness and originality of his thought are expressed: De l’amitié, De la douleur, De la mort, De la frivolité, Du gouvernement de l’âme, Du rire, De la jeunesse, Des moeurs, De la responsabilité.

Cocteau reaches on these pages a fuller dimension of chronicler of his age because the portraits and the landscapes and the anecdotes are all utilized, not for the purpose of dazzling or amusing, but for the purpose of saying what should be preserved of a man’s thoughts and memories, of putting into some kind of order the multiple difficulties of life. These can be expressed, but Cocteau knew as he wrote them that the difficulty of being cannot be expressed, cannot be put into that order which a page of writing represents.

The seriousness of La Difficulté d’être is continued in some of the pages of two other books: Lettre aux Américains of 1949, and Journal d’un inconnu of 1953. After spending twenty days in New York, where he helped direct the rehearsals of the Broadway production of The Two-headed Eagle, Cocteau wrote out, in the airplane taking him back to Paris, his impressions of America. He enumerated the paradoxes of New York: the desire to shock and the fear of shocking, the scorn of the theatre producer for the public he serves, the mysterious ways of Hollywood that had victimized Garbo and Chaplin. The success of Le Sang d’un poète in New York movie houses provoked commentaries which form an exegesis of the film, and corrections on various errors of interpretation. The film remains an enigma to Cocteau himself, but he would say that most of our actions are enigmatic. Cocteau was touched that his name was so well known to Americans (Harvard offered him a lectureship for a year), but he realized that Americans were not familiar with his books, and that an acquaintanceship with his books would bewilder and worry them.

In his Lettre, Cocteau quotes a passage from one of Baudelaire’s essays on Poe in which the French poet defends the decadence of Europe. An American critic had once used the word “juggler” to humiliate Poe, and Baudelaire points out that he used the word in order to praise the noblest kind of poet. The word “clown” or “juggler” designates the ease with which a poet or thinker disguises the labor behind the finished work. As examples of masters of this art of juggling, Cocteau names Picasso, Eluard, Breton, Sartre, and Genet. He reminds Americans that those poets who have brought the greatest honor and prestige to France are men who had been pursued by the police: Villon, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Nerval, Verlaine. We could add to the list the name of the poet Cocteau who continued to write out his thoughts during the night flight from New York to Paris, the figure of a free man, in the midst of that solitude which freedom requires, outside of all literary movements and churches and political parties. He had always written from some unlikely spot of solitude, such as an airplane in flight, and usually on the subject of freedom, and addressing his words to those who search for freedom.

Journal d’un inconnu, of 1953, is a group of essays which analyze familiar Cocteau themes, such as the essence of poetry (De l’invisibilité) and offer documentation on important events in Cocteau’s life: the quarrel with François Mauriac, for example, over Bacchus; his complicated relationship with Gide, with Claude Mauriac, and with Maurice Sachs; the genesis of his poem L’Ange Heurtebise; the production of Oedipus-Rex in 1952.

Some of the most striking pages in Journal d’un inconnu were inspired by a new friend of Cocteau, the scientist René Bertrand, and his book L’Univers cette unité. In reading this scientific book, Cocteau had discovered confirmations for personal intuitions concerning phenomena of space and time which he claims are revealed to the poet through his own clairvoyance. The essay called Des distances is on this theme in which Cocteau combats man’s tendency toward pessimism when he becomes aware of the prison of time and space.

“Celebrated but unknown”: these two words are used by Cocteau to describe his position in the world. Je suis sans doute le poète le plus inconnu et le plus célèbre. The visible part of his being is made up of false legends, but this protects the invisible part and permits him to attack conformity of thinking and behavior. “Attack” is too strong a verb to use, because Cocteau is never aggressive. His action is not combat, but rather it is an effort to project light on what is vital, on what is truth for him.

The theme of invisibility and visibility occurs in Cocteau’s text on Gide, Gide vivant, in which he defines Gide by his desire to be visible, to be a visible mystery, a visible enigma. The form of this text: questions asked Cocteau by Colin-Simard after Gide’s death, followed by answers, forced Cocteau to explain his thought more deliberately, more methodically than he would have done in the ordinary form of an essay. The differences between the two men, in temperament, in ways of living, in methods of writing, and the fundamental differences in their work, make of this text a revealing document on the artist in a general sense, and on specific aspects of modern French literature. The text was published in 1952, soon after it was written, and republished in 1959 in Poésie Critique I.

Throughout his long life, Gide had made himself so visible by his habits of confession, his self-analysis, the detailed revelations of his thought and action, that after his death the critic-archaeologists found little to excavate. There were no surprises left. But, according to Cocteau, Gide always added a Voltairian skepticism, a Voltairian malice, to the Rousseau type of confession.

A curious form of jealousy, almost childlike in quality, estranged the two men at various times. Cocteau believed that Gide’s real drama came from not being a poet. And yet there were moments of friendship and attentiveness. Gide, for example, greatly admired Thomas l’imposteur and Le Secret professionnel. But everything separated the two men: their temperaments and their books. Cocteau disliked the legends that had grown up about him and which on the whole were false. But Gide protected and encouraged his. Cocteau claimed that Gide had constructed his own labyrinth and enjoyed walking in it. But he never relinquished the thread which he held firmly in his hand. The gravity and seriousness of Gide are opposed to the nimbleness and wit of Jean Cocteau.

Each in his own way was a preacher of doctrines and each attracted a youthful audience. There are relationships between some of their works: the character Thomas in Thomas l’imposteur belongs to the same race as Lafcadio in Les Caves du Vatican. The world of Les Parents terribles bears some resemblance with that of Les Faux-Monnayeurs. Major differences between the two writers are visible in their personal writings: in the Journal of Gide, so conscientious in its analysis of impressions and events and readings, and Cocteau’s two books of essays: La Difficulté d’être and Journal d’un inconnu, where memories are reduced to aphoristic interpretations and events are used as imaginary stories for moral and aesthetic principles. Circumstantial reporting becomes for Gide a means of self-exploration, whereas for Cocteau it is inevitably turned into an impersonally phrased intuition concerning the ways in which man lives and thinks and works.

Whereas Gide analyzes the habits of society that prevent man from reaching sincerity, Cocteau pays little heed to such matters in order to describe man as a solitary being moving about in the universe, a human solitude intent on stalking the invisible in himself and outside of himself, intent on sketching and articulating what comes to him from the perspective of dreams.

For Gide, the word “morality” preserves its classical meaning and hence designates the behavior of a man in society, the behavior of a man in terms of his fellow man. But for Cocteau, who also uses the word, it has a more vague meaning. It is a way of appearing or being in the world. It is the natural elegance of a man’s soul. It is a form of secular grace bestowed on the enfants terribles of this world who are innocent and frail because they do not connive with the social forces. When writers are poets, in the Cocteau sense, they possess this morality and they acquire instinctivly the genius for solitude. Performers too, whether they be acrobats or tragediennes, are monstres sacrés for Cocteau when they inhabit the world of the invisible as much as they remain within the implacable demanding world of the visible.

The faculty of judging the actions of men is concomitant with the moral system as evolved by society. Man may be directed by other forces, such as the world of sleep, the virtues of childhood, the abiding power of friendship. These form, for Cocteau, not a system of values, but experiences based upon a spontaneous kind of inspiration. Cocteau was never able to bear ill-feeling toward anyone. As soon as a man seemed to be his enemy—Maurice Sachs or Gide or Mauriac —his whole way of living urged him to turn animosity or irritation into love and appreciation. A mere list of the various friends he helped is a moral commentary in itself: Cendrars, Maritain, Apollinaire, Satie, Genet.

He once called Picasso a Harlequin from Port-Royal, and he himself was a philosophical Harlequin who, whenever the performance of the play or the circus act was over, showed the audience the wings and the backstage, where the stage hands were taking down the set and putting away the props.

It is not difficult to praise striking details throughout the entire work of Cocteau, but it is more difficult to discover and explain the unifying force of inspiration, the bond that joins so many varied works. The nobility of his heart, a politeness associated with the manners of royalty, a generosity of spirit, are the first elements that will help define his genius. The solitude of the artist in Cocteau was always maintained, and perhaps for that very reason, as compensation. He gave of himself unstintingly in conversation, in help, in attentiveness, in friendship, to those who approached him.

When friendships became too involved with his work, whenever they threatened to become an obstacle to his work, he moved away from them, but not in order to eliminate friendships. As a very young man, he was flattered by the attention paid to him by such celebrities as Anna de Noailles and Maurice Barrés. But he did withdraw from the circle of such friends. A few years later, Cocteau was the friend of most of the leading surrealists, but he did not hesitate to leave them when he felt it important for him to write in accordance with a classical form of poetry. The same thing occurred at Meudon with the group of friends he met at the home of Jacques and Raïssa Maritain. The speed with which he worked and created was his own tempo, a necessity of his temperament, a need of his nature. He was an artisan as well as an artist and quite simply assumed responsibility of the labor involved in theatrical and film productions. He directed everyone with the passion of his spirit, convinced that even the most popular audiences would be touched by his art. The decoration of the Villefranche chapel was hard work done on scaffoldings where in graphic art he represented Saint Peter surrounded by a world of fishermen and which today is visited by all the tourists on the Riviera. The early advice given by Serge de Diaghileff: étonne-moi, was followed to the letter during the next quarter of a century during which each new work was the result of some comparable solicitation.

In his critical essays, as well as in his poems and films, Jean Cocteau sought to give back to the word “poetry” its literal meaning. He attempted to prove that poetry is never mere imitation but creation. All true creators: writers, sculptors, musicians, painters, are poets in the sense that a work of art is not an object in which a thought is fixed forever. It is comparable to the organism whose function is to give to the world a limitless number of meanings. Because of these meanings, destined to be revived each generation, Orpheus remains in the world. Je reste avec vous are the words engraved on the tombstone in the chapel of Saint-Blaise-des-Simples in Milly.