The Difficulty of Being Read online

  PRAISE FOR JEAN COCTEAU

  “One of the most inspiring creators—and self-creations—of the twentieth century.”

  —THE NEW YORKER

  “To enclose the collected works of Cocteau one would need not a bookshelf, but a warehouse.”

  —W. H. AUDEN

  “One of the master craftsmen.”

  —TENNESSEE WILLIAMS

  “A [man] to whom every great line of poetry was a sunrise, every sunset the foundations of the Heavenly City.”

  —EDITH WHARTON

  “[Cocteau] had, and still has, a huge influence on the avant-garde of American film.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  “Cocteau has the freest mind, and the purest, in Europe …”

  —EZRA POUND

  “A comet that passed over French cinema, throwing a vivid light on the landscape.”

  —DAVID THOMSON,

  THE NEW BIOGRAPHICAL DICTIONARY OF FILM

  “He left his mark on an entire era.”

  —NEW YORK TIMES

  “A true Renaissance man.”

  —CHICAGO TRIBUNE

  “Brilliant jack-of-all-trades, longtime adept in the art of enchantment, this creator whose originality eluded the confines of any particular artistic or literary movement dedicated himself to but a single master: astonishment, his own as much as that of others.”

  —ACADEMIE FRANCAISE

  THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING

  JEAN COCTEAU (1889–1963) was born in the Paris suburbs to a wealthy family. His father, a prominent attorney and amateur painter, committed suicide when Cocteau was nine, and he was sent off to a private school—from which he was expelled a few years later. Cocteau ran off to Marseille and then Paris, where he haunted theatrical and artistic circles. He published his first volume of poetry, Aladdin’s Lamp, at nineteen, and another two years later called The Frivolous Prince, which became his nickname. He soon circulated in the highest ranks of Parisian bohemia and counted Proust and Gide among his friends. During World War I, he served with the Red Cross as an ambulance driver, a period in which he met and became close to Apollinaire, Picasso, Modigliani, and many others with whom he would later collaborate. A leading exponent of avant-garde art, he created scenarios for the Ballet Russes and librettos for operas by Stravinsky and Satie. He wrote and directed his own films, including Beauty and the Beast, a seminal work in cinema history, and Orpheus. His other important works include the play The Human Voice and the novel The Holy Terrors. Known in his lifetime for a libertine lifestyle—he lived with the actor Jean Marais and was, at one time, an opium addict—Cocteau died of a heart attack after being informed of the death of his friend, the singer Edith Piaf.

  ELIZABETH SPRIGGE (1900–74) translated the works of Jean Cocteau and August Strindberg. She was also the author of a biography of Gertrude Stein.

  GEOFFREY O’BRIEN is the editor in chief of the Library of America. His writing has been collected in Stolen Glimpses, Captive Shadows: Writing on Film, 2002–2012.

  THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

  I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much. —HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

  THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING

  Originally published in French as La difficulté d’être in 1947

  Copyright © Éditions du Rocher, 2003

  English translation copyright © 1966 by the translator,

  reprinted by arrangement with the translator’s estate

  Introduction copyright © 2013 Geoffrey O’Brien

  First Melville House printing: May 2013

  Cover photograph: Germaine Krull (1897–1985) © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen. Jean Cocteau, 1929. Gelatin silver print, 8 ¾ × 6 9/16 “(22.3 × 16.6 cm). Mount: 13 × 10 ⅛” (33 × 25.7 cm). Sitter: John Cocteau.

  Thomas Walther Collection. Gift of Thomas Walther.

  The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, U.S.A.

  Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY

  Melville House Publishing

  145 Plymouth Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11201

  and

  8 Blackstock Mews

  Islington

  London N4 2BT

  www.mhpbooks.com

  eISBN: 978-1-61219-291-8

  A catalog record for this title is available from the Library of Congress.

  v3.1

  This translation is dedicated to the memory of

  KATRIONA SPRIGGE

  whose unfailing interest sustained me during ‘la difficulté de traduire’

  —Elizabeth Sprigge

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Authors

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  by Geoffrey O’Brien

  Foreword

  On conversation

  On my childhood

  On my style

  On the work and the legend

  On Raymond Radiguet

  On my physique

  On my escapes

  On France

  On the theatre

  On Diaghilev and Nijinsky

  On the marvels of cinematography

  On friendship

  On dreams

  On reading

  On measurement and Marcel Proust

  On haunted houses

  On pain

  On death

  On frivolity

  On the Palais-Royal

  On the rule of the soul

  On Guillaume Apollinaire

  On laughter

  On being without being

  On words

  On youth

  On beauty

  On customs

  On line

  On a drama in mime

  On responsibility

  Postscript

  Note

  INTRODUCTION

  GEOFFREY O’BRIEN

  “I do not for a moment conceal from myself,” Jean Cocteau writes at the end of The Difficulty of Being, “the terrible harm that a witty lawyer, a witness for the prosecution, and the distance that separates the jury from a poet, can do to my work through my personality.” He adds in a footnote: “I know very well what will be said about this book. The author’s preoccupation with himself is exasperating. Who is not thus preoccupied?” To talk about Cocteau, or to see his work clearly, one must first, as it were, get Cocteau out of the way. He plants himself in the heart of every sentence and every image in the same way that he planted himself in every salon and theater and literary forum. François Mauriac called him a “ubiquitist”; some have been tempted to see in him a sort of Zelig of twentieth-century French culture, evading precise definition even as he pops up at every turn.

  He was indeed everywhere, from the moment he made his first minor splash as a teenage dandy whose poems were presented in 1908 at a public reading organized by the equally dandyish actor Édouard de Max. It was always as a poet that he defined himself, but his sense of what poetry was extended easily to theater, ballet, art, design, fiction, film. He wrote the scena
rio for the Diaghilev ballet Parade, with music by Satie and stage design by Picasso; he promoted and collaborated with the composers of Les Six; he wrote the libretto for Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex. He produced at least one pervasively influential novel, Les Enfants Terribles, and a series of films that may well prove his most enduring works. He was also a star—he affixed a star under his signature in case anyone should forget—a celebrated conversationalist whose nonstop monologues could seem like a way of sustaining his very sense of being, a scene-maker whose name and image were familiar even to those otherwise unacquainted with his work.

  He provoked scandal (aside from any scandal that may have been stirred by his openly gay mode of life)—with the incestuously charged stage melodrama Les Parents Terribles; with the homosexual theme of the anonymously published novel The White Paper; with his memoir of drug addiction, Opium—yet seemed always to embody his own declaration (in the 1918 artistic manifesto Cock and Harlequin) that “tact in audacity consists in knowing how far one may go too far.” His poems, plays, and novels fill three thick volumes in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, with much more potentially yet to come. Adored by the dowagers and socialites of the Right Bank, he was an object of abhorrence to many on the cultural left. André Breton, a lifelong foe, declared in 1959 that Cocteau “must be considered the anti-poet because his constitution is that of the arch impostor, the born con man.”

  Instances of the prosecutorial approach that Cocteau anticipated are not hard to find. There is no need to look further than Frederick Brown’s 1969 biography, An Impersonation of Angels, with its title already implying a certain fakery as Cocteau’s very essence. From the evidence that Brown deftly assembles, one is encouraged to form an impression of Cocteau as an eternal bourgeois child in search of approval from the moneyed and powerful; a self-promoting narcissist obsessed with celebrity, associating with artists greater than himself in order to inflate his own credentials; a seducer of young men and a smoker of opium; in essence a hollow man constantly seeking to elaborate further flourishes for his self-created legend, theatrically stage-managing his crises and illnesses, endowed at best with a facility verging on glibness; a great pretender; a trickster half taken in by his own tricks.

  Some of this of course is more or less on target—not surprisingly, since much of the evidence is drawn from Cocteau’s own writings. “No one knows his own weaknesses better than I,” he writes in an early passage of The Difficulty of Being. “If I happen to read some article attacking me, I feel that I could strike closer to the mark.” Yet he is not inclined to self-condemnation. This book, written in 1947, is written rather in a mood of detached self-examination. He makes himself his own portraitist, his own commentator. He looks for a sense of grounding: “Woe to him who has not kept a plot of ground on which to live, a small piece of himself within himself.” He seems determined to work out some basic definitions, to lay down for the record the terms within which he has lived and worked. It is most fundamentally a work of criticism, in which by paying close attention to his own writing process he creates a different kind of writing, opaque and deliberate. Cocteau maps his own limits and seems to come at moments to the very edge of dismantling that persona he created but of which he is in some sense a prisoner—but only to the edge.

  There is less of the charmer or circus performer on this occasion. A certain effortless fluency had always been a mark, and a danger, of Cocteau’s style. He was known as a wit from an early age. French dictionaries of quotations contain many pages of his aphoristic remarks, which often find a way to blend oracular pronouncement and ebullient one-liner into a single unmistakable tone. It was this quality, perhaps, more than any other that was distrusted by the surrealists. How could any style so sparkling, so immediately pleasing, have anything to do with what they understood by art or poetry? In The Difficulty of Being that flair for bedazzlement is restrained and put under pressure, as if by slowing himself down Cocteau could arrive at a more painful level of truth-telling.

  The book was written in the wake of what in retrospect was one of his greatest achievements, the film Beauty and the Beast. Making the film had been an exhausting process aggravated by the acute eczema that had begun to afflict Cocteau, and which he details in many pages here. The horrors of that pullulating skin ailment torment these sentences as they did his body. There was also, perhaps, a lingering sense of the cloud that still hung over him in the wake of the Liberation; he had only narrowly avoided more severe criticism for some of the friendships he had maintained during the Occupation with Germans such as Ernst Jünger and, more disturbingly, the sculptor Arno Breker, Hitler’s own preferred artist. He was approaching sixty, and the preoccupation with death in which his work had always been steeped was now becoming a more plausible and everyday presence.

  The stock elements of Cocteau’s poems and plays—the mirrors and masks and angels and sacrificial victims and messengers from beyond—are notably absent here. The conjuror lays aside his tricks. But Cocteau being Cocteau, might this not be a subtler form of conjuring? He invokes Montaigne at several points, as if to suggest that he too is showing us his real face without mask or makeup. No magic here, no marvels, no fantasy, these being only sloppy evasive terms in which to talk about artistic craftsmanship. The craftsman’s gift “does not lie in card tricks. He goes beyond jugglery. That is only his syntax.” Rituals and dangerous habits, yes. Cocteau comes close to acknowledging a fundamental vulnerability, a subjection to fears against which, perhaps, his whole body of work has been raised as a protective counter-world. “My worst fault,” he acknowledges, “like almost everything in me, springs from childhood. For I am still the victim of those unhealthy rites which make children obsessive, so that they arrange their plates in a certain way at meals and only step over certain grooves in the pavement.” The techniques of art may be only an adaptation of these earlier methods that evolved as a stay against the overwhelming invasions of anxiety. When he speaks of the ultimate source of his poetry, it’s located in “a zone in man into which man cannot descend, even if Virgil were to lead him there, for Virgil himself did not descend into it.”

  The darkest passages—and there are many dark passages in this book—are alleviated by the presence of other people. Memories of Apollinaire, Proust, the ever-regretted Raymond Radiguet: these provide companionship for a writer who can state that “I like other people and only exist through them.” (He was indeed someone who found it almost impossible to be alone.) A prosecutor, again, might take such reminiscences as one more instance of Cocteau inserting himself into literary history to establish his claims. In any case it is difficult to let go of the vision of Proust reading from the as yet unpublished Swann’s Way—“Proust would start anywhere, would mistake the page, confuse the passage, repeat himself, begin again, break off to explain that the lifting of the hat in the first chapter would reveal its significance in the last volume”—in the midst of his cluttered sanctum, the “Jules Verne room,” where Proust figured as Captain Nemo, the obsessed navigator steering with uncanny knowledge by instruments whose precise use seems random and chaotic to anyone but himself.

  Those scenes of the past do inevitably take on a nostalgic glow in light of the present moment in which Cocteau registers the death of friends and lovers and the visible deterioration of his body. The “plot of ground” he has sought out as a place to live is evidently far from being a place of tranquil reflection, in the unlikely event that reflection was ever a tranquil matter for Cocteau. It is curiously in a chapter devoted to laughter that he comes close to conveying the deepest possible sense of inward turmoil. He opens with a typically elegant aphorism: “Like the heart and like sex, laughter functions by erection. Nothing swells it that does not excite it. It does not rise of its own accord.” For several pages he improvises on this theme, making offhand remarks about jokes, banter, theatrical comedy, and audience reactions, and then abruptly changes gear: “What would become of me without laughter? It purges me of my disgust … It is the sign th
at I am not quite sunk by contact with the vegetable world in which I move.”

  We are suddenly brought into the garden—just such a garden as in another text might be the very image of a lost paradise—but for which Cocteau is nothing but the site of endless bitter struggle, of unleashed appetites and permanent danger: “It is Dante’s Inferno. Each tree, each bush, shudders in the place assigned to it, in torment. The flowers it puts forth are like fires one lights, like cries for help.” Vegetable life is immortal, renewed over and over through the planting of seeds, but the price it pays for that immortality is immobility. Man has the great gift of movement—but, “because everything has to be paid for,” he pays for it with death and the knowledge of death.

  It is a kind of natural history writing toward which Cocteau is tending here and elsewhere. He sees his art as arising in just such a dangerous and contentious garden, of its own force, an “ ‘absurd genius,’ genius that man, whether he likes it or not, has in common with the plants.” This is finally Cocteau’s self-defense. He cannot be blamed if he is only the vessel or vehicle of something beyond himself: “I am never tired of examining that phenomenon in which we appear to be so free and are, if the truth were told, without a shadow of freedom.” The apparent gaiety and free-form spontaneity of his creations cannot disguise the terrifying pressures that give rise to them. Beauty is monstrous: “It is certain that the rhythm of this great machine is a cruel one.”

  In a later book he would write: “Poetry is a religion without hope.” The graceful resolutions that art finds it finds for itself alone, and the sole immortality is the survival of art. In his last film, The Testament of Orpheus (1960), Cocteau would film his death, burying himself within the filmic image as if he could also be reborn within it. The only hope that The Difficulty of Being dares indulge in is one that could have been, and perhaps was, lifted from Whitman: the hope that this very book will be read by “the youth of a period when I shall no longer be there in flesh and bone.” He addresses himself amorously to this future reader: “Little by little you will feel that I inhabit you and you will resurrect me.” Such a hope is all that remains to him after the act of demystification he has performed here. Whatever prestidigitation and acrobatics he has elsewhere indulged in are here laid bare, not bitterly, but for once with a harsh clarity.