by Jean Cocteau
There he pumiced himself, he schooled himself, he filed himself down and forged the vessel and the small orifice through which his exquisite strength had only to flow freely.
Once free, he would make fun of himself, tease Ravel, and out of modesty give to the fine pieces played by Ricardo Viñes droll titles calculated immediately to alienate many mediocre minds.
There you have the man. Certainly it would have been pleasanter to wallow in the waves of Wagner and of Debussy. But we had to have a rule of life, however obscure it may seem to you. Every age rejects some kinds of charm. Already in Le Coq et l’Arlequin I denounced that of Le Sacre. And in rejecting himself Stravinsky was to outdo us all.
Erik Satie was my schoolmaster. Radiguet my examiner. Contact with them showed me my faults without their having to tell me of them, and if I was unable to correct them, at least I knew them.
To shape oneself is not easy. To reshape oneself still less so. Until Les Mariés de la Tour Eiffel, the first work in which I owed nothing to anybody, and which is unlike any other, in which I discovered my cypher, I forced the lock and twisted my key in every direction.
Orphée, L’Ange Heurtebise, Opéra saved me from such goings on. True, one soon falls into them again, and until that day when I succeeded in not involving myself in anything, I mean to say in only involving myself in what concerns me, I still found myself in tight corners.
My worst fault, 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.
In the midst of work, here are these symptoms gripping me, forcing me to resist what is driving me, involving me in strange halting writing, preventing me from saying what I want to say.
That is why my style often assumes an air of its own which I loathe, or else suddenly drops it. Inward cramps which reproduce those nervous peculiarities to which childhood abandons itself in secret and by which it believes it can exorcise fate.
Even now as I am explaining them, I experience them. I try to conquer them. I stumble against them, I get bogged down in them, I lose myself in them. I should like to break the spell. My obsession gets the better of me.
I may possibly flatter myself that I can give an outline to what I turn out, whereas so little am I able to do this that the very force which I turn out resists me and decides for itself even the shape of its outline.
That is my definition of the writing sickness from which I suffer and which makes me prefer conversation.
I have few words in my pen. I turn them over and over. The idea gallops ahead. When it stops and looks back, it sees me flagging behind. That puts it out of patience. It escapes. And it is lost for good.
I leave the paper. I busy myself with something else, I open my door. I am free. That’s easily said. The idea returns at top speed and I plunge into work.
It is my passionate struggling against cramp that earns me a covering of legends, some more absurd than others. I am a man made invisible by fables and monstrously visible on account of this.
A course that sidetracks people soon wearies them. They grow tired of following us. They invent one for us, and if we do not conform to this course, they bear us a grudge. It is too late for us to complain. We ‘look fine’, as they say. It is dangerous not to conform with people’s image of us, because they do not readily retract their opinions.
It is along the way of one’s escape that the legend grows and thrives.
If a foreign critic judges us, there is a good chance that he will hit the mark. He knows us better than our compatriots who flatten their noses against us. Here space plays the part of time. Our compatriots judge the work through the man. Seeing of the man nothing but a false image, their judgment is false.
It is, it seems, a social crime to desire solitude. After a piece of work, I flee. I seek new territory. I fear the slackness of habit. I want to be free of techniques, of experience—clumsy. That is, to be a trifler, a traitor, an acrobat, a fantaisiste. To be complimentary: a magician.
A wave of the wand and the books are written, the film is shot, the pen draws, the play is staged. It is very simple. Magician. That word makes everything easy. No need to labour at our work. It all happens of its own accord.
ON RAYMOND RADIGUET
AT MY VERY FIRST MEETING WITH RAYMOND RADIGUET I may say that I guessed his star quality. How? You may well ask. He was small, pale, short-sighted, his badly cut hair hanging round his collar and giving him side-whiskers. He puckered up his face as if in the sun. He skipped as he walked. It was as if for him the pavements were made of rubber. He pulled little pages of copybooks out of his pockets, which he screwed into a ball. He smoothed them out with the palm of his hand and, hampered by one of the cigarettes he rolled himself, tried to read a very short poem. He glued it to his eye.
These poems were not like any others of the period I am talking about. Rather they contradicted that period and relied on nothing that came before. Let me say, in passing, that this superb touch, this isolation of words, this density of emptiness, this ventilation of the whole, has so far not been noticed by anyone in France, and the many pastiches which they try to sell do not even amount to a caricature.
He gave ancient formulas back their youth. He rubbed down banalities. He cleaned up the commonplace. Whenever he touched them, it was as if his clumsy fingers were putting shells back into water. This was his privilege. He alone could lay claim to it.
‘One should be precious,’ he would say, and in his mouth the word precious gave one a sense of great rarity, as of a precious stone.
We met continually. He idled around. He lived at Parc Saint-Maur with his family, would miss the train, return on foot, walk through the wood and, as if he were a child, dread hearing the roar of the lions in the zoo. If he stayed in Paris he slept at some painter’s, on a table, among tubes of paint and brushes. He talked little. If he wanted to inspect a canvas or a script, he would take a pair of broken spectacles out of his pocket and use them as an eyeglass.
Not only did he invent and teach us this idea, which was startlingly new, of not appearing original (which he called wearing a new suit); not only did he advise us to write ‘like everybody else’, because it is just by way of the impossible that originality can express itself, but he also set us the example of work. For that lazy creature (I had to lock him in his room to make him finish a chapter), that bad schoolboy who would escape through the window and scamp his homework (he always went back to it in the end), had become a Chinaman crouching over his books. He used to read masses of mediocre works, comparing them with masterpieces, returning to them, taking notes, annotating, rolling cigarettes and declaring that, since the mechanics of a masterpiece are invisible, he could only learn from books which passed as such but in fact were not.
His rages were rare but terrible. He grew pale as death. Jean Hugo and Georges Auric must remember one evening beside the lake at Arcachon, when we were all reading round a kitchen table. I was tactless enough to say that Moréas wasn’t so bad. I read his verses. Radiguet rose, snatched the book from me, crossed the beach, flung it in the water and returned with the face of a murderer, unforgettable.
His novels, specially in my opinion Le Diable au Corps, as astonishing in their way as Rimbaud’s poems, have never had any help from our modern encyclopaedists. Radiguet was too unorthodox. And it was he who taught me not to lean on anything.
Doubtless he had a plan; he was carrying out a long-term programme. He would, one day, have orchestrated his work, and even, I feel sure, have taken all practical steps to make it known. He was awaiting his moment. Death took him first.
That is why, as I got from him what little perception I possess, his death left me without guidance, incapable of steering my boat, of helping my work and making provision for it.
ON MY PHYSIQUE
I HAVE NEVER HAD A BEAUTIFUL FACE. YOUTH stood me in
the stead of beauty. My bony structure is good. The flesh hangs badly upon it. Moreover in the long run the skeleton changes and gets spoilt. My nose, which used to be straight, is becoming as Roman as my grandfather’s. And I noticed that, on her death-bed, my mother’s too had become Roman. Too many inner storms, sufferings, attacks of doubt, rebellions suppressed by sheer force, cudgellings of fate, have wrinkled my forehead, dug a deep crease between my eyebrows, weighted down my eyelids, slackened my hollow cheeks, turned down the corners of my mouth, in such a way that if I lean over a low mirror I see my mask separating itself from the bone and taking on a shapeless form. My beard sprouts white. My hair, while losing its thickness, has kept its rebellion. This has resulted in a tangle of locks growing in all directions which cannot be combed. If they are smoothed down they give me a seedy look. If they stand on end this hirsute coiffure looks like a sign of affectation.
My teeth overlap. In brief, on a body neither tall nor short, slim and lean, equipped with feet and hands that are admired because they are long and very expressive, I carry an unrewarding head. It gives me a false arrogance. This false arrogance comes from a desire to conquer the embarrassment I feel at showing myself as I am, and its quickness in disappearing from the fear that it might be mistaken for real arrogance.
This results in too swift a transition from reserve to effusion, from self-assurance to awkwardness. Hatred is unknown to me. I forget injuries so completely that I am apt to smile at my enemies when I meet them face to face. Their astonishment is a cold douche and wakes me up. I don’t know which way to look. I am astonished that they remember the wrong they did to me, which I had forgotten.
It is this natural bent to live in accordance with the Gospels that draws me away from dogma. Joan of Arc is my great writer. No one finds truer expression than she does in form or in substance.* Without any doubt she would have been blunted had she adopted a style. As she is, she is style itself, and I never tire of reading and re-reading the reports of her trial. Antigone is my other saint. Those two anarchists measure up to the seriousness I like, which Gide denies in my work, my own brand of seriousness that does not conform to what is usually called by this name. It is that of the poet. Scholars of every age scorn it. If it makes them jealous, without them admitting it to themselves, they may go to the length of crime. Voltaire, Diderot, Grimm only display an attitude as old as the world and one which will only disappear with me. One that is opposed to poets and turns against them curved weapons, very terrible at close range.
Rousseau has left bloody traces of this man-hunt all the way to Hume, where the kill was to take place. Let none believe that such relentlessness evaporates. Something remains. Rousseau will always be an instance of persecution mania. He had it. But he was given cause for it. As well blame the stag at bay for using its horns.
* Glory through the medium of a minority can only be the prerogative of artists. This system would not work for politicians, but sometimes pride induces them to take the risk. Failing unanimity, the majority harms them. So then they fall back on this minority which, during their term of office, would not have been strong enough. The case of Joan of Arc is different. Her ballot is small. She has only three voices. However, they count. Joan of Arc is a poet.
ON MY ESCAPES
I FIND THE SOURCE OF THAT FEAR OF THE CHURCH, which drives me towards Joan of Arc, in her trial and in Les Provinciales. Reading this work has always filled me with consternation, as has the fact that a mind like Pascal’s, even if he had to plead the cause of the just, could consent to examine such balderdash.
Several people have dispelled my fear, among them Jacques Maritain and Charles Henrion, for indeed the respect which they inspire brings one’s soul to its knees. But the singular quality they have is subordinated to a plurality, to a narrow rule which they make boundless, into which we are dragged by our faith in them, whereupon the bounds appear and imprison us on every hand. It was when I became aware of this manoeuvre, to which they submit without guile, that I took to my heels as swiftly as I could and ratted. Their heart, my faith, my sincerity remain with me.
La Lettre à Maritain bears witness to this attack of doubt. I thought I could transfer to God’s account what was usually credited to the Devil’s. In it I set up hardness against purity. I referred to an admirable saying of Maritain’s: ‘The Devil is pure because he can do nothing but evil.’ If purity is not softness asserting itself, but a concrete matter, why should not such matter, rejected by weak goodness, be adopted by hard goodness, and so once more become part of it? I was ingenuous.
In the gentle hands of priests a bomb only explodes if they so wish. They caught mine in mid-air and, wrapping it in layer upon layer of cotton wool, made of it an article of conversion, that is to say an example. My enemies saw in it nothing but a reactionary move. This futile attempt brought me nothing but a family and that outer support which some seek in the family, others in the Church, in sects, in the École Normale, in Polytechnics, in the Foreign Office, in a political party or in a café. Such support upset the habit I had long formed of not leaning on anything but myself.
Maritain found my going heavy. He wanted to open a way for me. It was his own he opened to me. Alas I could not keep up with him, possessing neither the wings of angels nor the vast spiritual mechanism of that soul in the guise of a body. Deprived of my legs, nothing was left to me but fatigue. I escaped.
I was listening last night to a young captain in my hotel telling me about his escapes from Germany and Spain. Back in France, after getting to London via Gibraltar, he suffers from a feeling of flatness and misses adventure. The same problem faces the whole of a younger generation, unconscious of the existence of internal wars, internal prisons, internal escapes, mortal dangers and internal tortures, and so, not knowing what it is to live, only catching a fortuitous glimpse of it and thinking itself no longer alive because circumstances no longer present it with the means to live. Mlle X … was a nurse in the American army. Women who do not tend the wounded revolt her. The least comfort shocks her. An elegant woman is an insult to her. She never suspects that this is the maternal instinct working in her, for which, lacking marriage and children, she makes another outlet.
It is in this way that a war is disastrous. If it does not kill, it transmits to some an energy alien to their own resources; to others it permits what the law forbids and accustoms them to short cuts. It artificially glorifies ingenuity, pity, daring. A whole younger generation believes itself to be sublime and collapses when it has to draw on itself for patriotism and fate.
The surprise of these exiles from drama would be great if they were to discover that those tragic episodes, whose sudden cessation has left them on the brink of a void, are just as plentiful in this void as in themselves. That it would be enough to retreat into themselves and pay the costs within instead of without. If the war could enlighten them as to how to use their talents on their own later on, it would be a rough school. But it only gives them an excuse for living faster, and real life appears to them like death. When I write that I escaped, after the letter to Maritain, I mean this literally. I experienced all the palpitations, the anguish, the uncertainty, the patience, the resourcefulness about which that captain used to talk to me. And this was not my first escape, nor my last. I have more than one to my credit.
Jacques Maritain often visited me at the clinic where I was disintoxicating myself of opium. I had taken opium, formerly taken daily by our masters under the label of laudanum or opiates, in order to alleviate intolerable nervous pains. After the death of Raymond Radiguet, whom I thought of as my son, these pains had gained such an ascendency that Louis Laloy, at Monte Carlo, advised the palliative. Opium is a living substance. It does not like to be hustled. It made me ill. It was only after a quite long trial that it came to my aid. But it slowed up the works and I feared it. My numerous attempts to flee from it, my checks, my relapses, my success (due to Dr Lichwitz) after five failures, would be worth dwelling on at length. How many cells I escape
from, how many sentries take aim at me, how many fortresses I am led back to, the walls of which I succeed in vaulting!
My first important escape (for I do not count those from school, my flight to Marseilles and other escapades) was in 1912. I came of a family that loved music and painting, and for whom literature meant little or nothing. My father used to paint. Whenever an artist opens his box I smell the oil paints. I see him. My grandfather collected excellent pictures, Stradivarius and Greek busts. He arranged quartets. In which he played the cello. I drew. I wrote. I gave myself up, blindly, to gifts, which if they are not channelled scatter our efforts and act like a pox. Naturally people flattered me. I met no obstacles. I found followers. I succeeded in bewitching a fair number and in being intoxicated with my mistakes.
Without any doubt this line was leading straight to the Académie. One day I met Gide. He made me ashamed of my writing. I was embellishing it with arabesques. He was the source of a sudden awakening, the approach to which cost me dear. Few people will allow one to discover oneself. They accuse us of going over to the other camp. Deserter here, suspect there: it is the loneliness of Calchas.*
The Russian Ballet of Serge de Diaghilev played its part in this critical phase. He was splashing Paris with colour. The first time I attended one of his performances (they were giving Le Pavillon d’Armide) I was in a stall rented by my family. The whole thing unfolded far away behind the footlights, in that burning bush in which the theatre blazes for those who do not regularly go backstage.
I met Serge de Diaghilev at Madame Sert’s. From that moment I became a member of the company. I no longer saw Nijinsky except from the wings or from the box in which, behind Madame Sert, topped with her Persian aigrette, Diaghilev followed his dancers with a pair of tiny mother-of-pearl opera glasses.
