The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  Do not expect me to follow Proust on his nocturnal excursions and describe them to you. But you may know that these took place in a cab belonging to Albaret, the husband of Céleste, a night cab truly worthy of Fantômas himself.‖ From these trips, whence he returned at dawn, clutching his fur-lined coat, deathly pale, his eyes dark-circled, a bottle of Evian water protruding from his pocket, his black fringe over his forehead, one of his button boots unbuttoned, his bowler hat in his hand, like the ghost of Sacher Masoch, Proust would bring back figures and calculations which allowed him to build a cathedral in his bedroom and to make wild roses grow there.

  Albaret’s cab took on a particularly sinister appearance in the daytime. Proust’s daytime outings took place once or twice a year. We made one together. This was to go and look at the Gustave Moreaus at Madame Ayen’s, and afterwards, at the Louvre, Mantegna’s Saint Sebastien and Ingres’s Turkish Bath.

  To come back to measurements. I linger over describing Proust, because he illustrates my thesis so well. And his handwriting, what does it look like on the pages of those exercise books, which all the members of the Nouvelle Revue Française would collate, cut out, paste in, try to decipher, in the rue Madame? Like ciphers as the word decipher indicates.

  By dint of adding, of multiplying, of dividing in time and in space, Proust brings his work to a close by the simplest of methods, of casting out the nines. Once more he finds the figures with which his work began. And this is where he captivates me.

  For his intrigues have lost some charm, his Verdurins some comedy, Charlus some tragedy, his duchesses some of the prestige of Mesdames de Maufrigneuse and d’Espars. But the structure of his measurements remains intact. Freed from anecdotes they interweave. They become the work itself. They are a scaffolding which obscures the monument.

  Swann, Odette, Gilberte, Albertine, Oriane, Vinteuil, Elstir, Françoise, Madame de Villeparisis, Charlus, the Queen of Naples, the Verdurins, Cottard, Morel, Rachel, Saint-Loup, la Berma, what do all these puppets mean to me? I see the framework that connects them, the joints of their encounters, the elaborate lace-work of their comings and goings. I am more struck by the interlocking of organs than by that of emotions, by the interlacing of veins than by flesh. My eye is that of a carpenter looking at the King’s scaffold. The planks interest me more than the execution.

  * Addition from 1st edition. E.S.

  † Do two and two make four? Gustave de Rothschild said: ‘Two and two make twenty-two.’ And two chairs and two apples do not make four.

  ‡ Sadi Carnot, black-bearded president of the French Republic in 1887. Assassinated in 1894. E.S.

  § This refers to a woman who was locked into her room for years by her mother and her brother. When eventually discovered, lying contentedly in a filthy bed among heaps of oyster shells, she never ceased to regret being moved from her ‘dear little grotto’. La Sequestrée de Poitiers: Documents Réunis par André Gide, Gallimard 1930. E.S.

  ‖ ‘Hero’ of one of the earliest crime-and-mystery serials by Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain. E.S.

  ON HAUNTED HOUSES

  YOU CANNOT HAUNT YOUR HOUSE AT WILL. IT IS A question of storm and fire. There have been times when mine rejected me. It withheld its assistance. The walls absorbed nothing. They lacked the great shadows of fire, the sheen of water. The more my house ignored me, the more I ignored it. This lack of exchange caused a deadlock. No longer could we lay traps for one another. No trap, no game. That means to live with an empty bag. My friends felt this. And they withdrew like the walls. I had to wait for the emanations to return, to counter one another, to form this explosive mixture which causes our dwellings to blaze. For they imitate us and only offer us what we give them. But this echo speaks and insists on dialogue.

  Of all my homes, rue Vignon was the most haunted. It was almost at the corner of the Place de la Madeleine, up under the roof, and had no pretensions to being pleasant. But there was flood and fire. I could not describe it. It was its emptiness that was full. Furniture, objects came there of their own accord. One did not see them. What one saw was this emptiness, an attic of emptiness, a dustbin of emptiness, an emptiness full to the brim. The ghosts queued up in it. The mob stood tight-wedged. There was no floating whatever. A crowd of shadows propped you up. The main body of the army occupied my room. The rest camped right down to the hall and on the stairs. Elbow to elbow. In heaps, in clusters. These on the floor, those on the walls or on the ceiling. Their tumult was a silent one. Guests liked this room. They did not notice anything peculiar except the whole thing. This whole comforted them, put them at their ease, relaxed them, cut them off from the outside. Those invisible people were my responsibility. They saw to the service, hotted up the drama to the right point. Horrors would break out. The emptiness would then make such eddies that one had to cling to some piece of wreckage. But my company would come into action, smother the flames, stamp out the embers.

  And tranquillity itself, once it had returned, looked like Phaedra, seated in her chair.

  A song of Marlene Dietrich’s was often heard there. The one beginning ‘Leben ohne Liebe kannst du nicht’. Recently I was dining at her table. I asked her for it. She sang it to me. The restaurant became my room. It emptied itself, it glorified itself. And the ancient ghosts appeared. And the dead rose from their tombs.

  Beside this room and that of Proust and that of Picasso, rue Schoelcher, which overlooked the Montparnasse cemetery and where the emptiness was inhabited by a mass of objects and forms, I have known haunted houses in which our phantoms played no part. They were haunted by the pleasing craziness of their owners. Their emptiness was full of another sort of emptiness: that of the obsession with emptiness and of a morbid desire to escape from it. The setting here was all-important and the strange appearance of these houses proceeded rather from the presence of things than from their invisibility.

  Good taste never produces spectres of this kind, and if Edgar Allan Poe had designed a house for himself, doubtless instead of being built on the pattern of his cottages, it would have taken its style from the House of Usher.

  If we must have ugliness, I have always preferred to good taste, which depresses me, the violent bad taste of those women who are actresses without a theatre, tragedians without tragedy, and with a physique predisposing them to extravagance. Such was the case of the Empress Elizabeth of Austria, and of Rachel when, too ill, she no longer acted. Then the dreams of such great ladies, in quest of dramatic action, materialize and become a setting for them. The one spends her energies on English Gothic, on trapezes, on columns, on plaster mouldings, the other on grottoes and monograms, on tortured bedsteads and on scroll-work anticipating ‘modern style’, oddly combining Greece with the Synagogue, the face of Antinoüs with a Jewish profile.

  The Marquise Casati owned a haunted house. It was not so before it was hers. It was the old Palais Rose which had belonged to the Comte Robert de Montesquiou.* The Comte de Montesquiou claimed that it was haunted. Haughty, a stickler for his due, this man who would have wanted both Mohammed and the mountain to come to him, pursued the acme of bad taste, and it repelled his advances. His mauve gloves, his basket of hydrangeas, his air of mystery and arrogance, put it to flight. Did he think he could seduce it or did he realize his efforts were vain? He died embittered and his house became the property of the Marquise.

  Luisa Casati was originally a brunette. Tall, bony, her gait, her great eyes, her teeth of a racehorse and her shyness did not accord with the conventional type of Italian beauties of the period. She astonished. She did not please.

  One day she decided to exploit her type to the full. It was no longer a matter of pleasing, displeasing or astonishing. It was a matter of dumbfounding. She came out of her boudoir as from the dressing-room of an actress. She was red-haired. Her locks stood on end and writhed round a Gorgon’s head, so painted that her eyes, that her mouth with its great teeth, daubed black and red, instantly turned men’s glances from other mouths and other eyes. And as t
hey were beautiful the men took in this. They no longer said: ‘She is nothing to write home about.’ They said to themselves: ‘What a pity that such a beautiful woman should daub herself in this way!’

  I imagine that her dresses too were the subject of long study. Like the Casati Isis which adorned a room in the Palais Rose and which we saw in 1945 at José-Maria Sert’s, she was coated in cloth of gold.

  I am reminded of Georgette Leblanc, of her trains of gold and her chasubles, climbing hills on a bicycle behind Maurice Maeterlinck. Artless women, courage personified, marvellous, you loved gold on your fabrics. You could never keep a sou.

  As soon as she came out of her dressing-room, the Marquise Casati received the applause usually given to a famous tragedian at her entry onto the stage. It remained to act the play. There was none. This was her tragedy and why her house became haunted. The emptiness had to be filled whatever the cost; never for a moment could one stop bringing down the curtain and raising it again on some surprise: a unicorn’s horn, dressed-up monkeys, a mechanical tiger, a boa constrictor. The monkeys developed tuberculosis. The unicorn’s horn became coated in dust. The mechanical tiger was eaten by moths, the boa constrictor died. This sinister bric-à-brac defied ridicule. It left no room for it. It reigned in the house of the Comte de Montesquiou. For indeed extravagances are paid for dearly, even in a frivolous world. Montesquiou collected other people’s extravagances and in this too he missed the mark. How could I not be reminded of the last scene of La Fille aux yeux d’or??† Like the Marquise de San Réal, the Marquise Casati, in the midst of the blood of objects and of animals, victims of her dream, adds more black and more red, disguises herself and turns round and round.

  May these lines be a tribute to her. I suspect that wherever she is, she carries, embedded between her shoulder blades, the Empress Elizabeth’s knife.

  For a house to be haunted there must be commitment. The Marquise was committed in her own way. The Comte de Montesquiou was not. For one can commit oneself at any rung of the ladder. From top to bottom.

  Sartre has raised a great hare here. But why does he restrict himself to visible commitment? The invisible commits further. This is to exclude the poets, who commit themselves for no other reason than to lose. My detractors acknowledge in me a freedom that commits me—in wrong directions. I know what they are thinking of. Of opium, of police raids, etc.… What have opium and police raids to do with this business? Our commitment is a matter for the soul. It consists in not keeping for oneself an iota of comfort.

  One haunted hotel was the Hotel Welcome at Villefranche. True, it was we who haunted it, because nothing predisposed it to be so. There was of course the shaded street. There were of course the Vauban ramparts and the barracks which, at night, evoke the absurd magnificence of dreams. There was, of course, on the left Nice, on the right, Monte Carlo and their pretentious architecture. But the Hotel Welcome was quite charming and seemed to have nothing to fear. Its rooms were painted with Ripolin. They had put a coat of yellow paint over the Italianate trompe-l’oeil of its façade. The bay harboured fleets. The fishermen mended their nets and slept in the sunshine.

  It all began with Francis Rose. His mother was clairvoyant. In the dining-room she would get up from the table, approach some gentleman or lady and foretell their future. She wore linen dresses on which Francis used to paint flowers. He was nearly seventeen. Everything dates from the dinner party given for his seventeenth birthday. An armchair draped in red velvet had been prepared for me at the end of the table and a bust of Dante stood beside my plate. Lady Rose had only invited some English officers and their wives. About eight o’clock a strange procession appeared at the bottom of the slope which led from the town to the harbour. Crowned with roses, Francis gave his arm to Madame Isadora Duncan in a Greek tunic. She was very fat, a little drunk, escorted by an American woman, a pianist and a few people picked up en route. The stupefaction of Lady Rose’s guests, her anger, the entry of the procession, the fishermen flattening their noses against the windowpanes, Isadora kissing me, Francis very proud of his crown, that is how this birthday dinner began. A deathly silence turned the guests to stone. Isadora kept laughing, sprawling against Francis. She even rose and led him into a window recess. It was just then that Captain Williams, a friend of the Roses, came on the scene. He had a habit of bringing pigeons and rabbits out of his sweater and his sleeves. He drank a lot. I suppose he had drunk a lot. He was holding a stick. He crossed the room, approached the window and, crying out in a loud voice, ‘Hi, you old hag, let go of that child!’ he brought his stick down on the head of the dancer. She fainted. Everything dates from that blow with the stick. Our rooms became, as in Le Sang d’un Poète, stage-boxes from which henceforth we watched the show, the battles between the sailors from French, English and American ships. Christian Bérard, Georges Hugnet, Glenway Wescott, Mary Butts, Monroe Wheeler, Philippe Lassell lived at the hotel. We drew, we invented, we visited from one room to another. A mythology was born of which Orphée sums up the style. Stravinsky was living at Mont Boron. I used to take him the Latin texts of Oedipus Rex. He was composing the oratorio as he received them. Those invisible people, who come when they will and keep an eye on us, were filling the hotel. They brought to it drama, dizziness, sacred fire.

  I am told that of the Hotel Welcome nothing remains but the walls.‡ That is the final triumph of the emptiness. Doubtless it will be rebuilt. But let travellers beware. It is haunted. Ghosts are not killed by bombs.

  * At Le Vésinet.

  † From La Comédie humaine by Balzac. E.S.

  ‡ Inaccurate.

  ON PAIN

  IT WOULD BE LOGICAL TO BEAR PAIN BETTER WHEN one is young, since one has a stretch of time before one and the hope of recovery. The pains of my youth, however, made me more impatient than I feel now. Yet I ought to say to myself that I have not much margin left and that if these pains last much longer there is a risk of my never getting rid of them. I take it that my present age is less foolish than was my youth, and that it is not through resignation or fatigue that I bear my complaints better, but through a sense of equilibrium. Perhaps too, having no time to lose, I tell myself that one must overcome the complaint and undertake the work of which it tries to defraud me. Perhaps again, no longer having any use for my person, other than a spiritual one, physical degradation affects me less. The fact is that I have been suffering every minute for the last six months, that I see my ills assuming every shape and form, defying medicine, and yet I remain alert and courageous. Writing these lines relieves me. It can even happen that in giving myself up to my memories, although this book urges me to curb them, I entirely forget my complaint and that I feel as if I were living, not in the room where I work, but in the place and the period I am describing.

  It is enough to make me wonder whether, since the work works on us and we are really not responsible for it, it is not just a defence mechanism against sickness which forces me to write this particular book.

  I like people whose youth heralds their age and whose structure allows one to visualize the appearance which will one day be theirs. Life sculptures them and perfects them. From a rough sketch they become what they should be and are firmly set in it. I have not had this good fortune. In me, youth is long drawn out. It becomes spoilt and does not set well. As a result I have the look, either of a young man blundering into old age, or of an old man blundering in an age which is no longer his. Some may think that I hang on to it. This is very far from true. If it is a fine thing for a young man to be young, it is a fine thing for an old man to be old. Moreover, youth should be apparent in speech and in looks. What worries me is this false youth that impels me into behaviour which I far from intend, since I detest sham, and if I were able to control my actions, I should play the part of an old man. I dare not confess here, even though I am resolved to tell all, the ingenuousness that shackles me and urges me towards mistakes which a person of my age would never commit. I know nothing of the world. The least learning make
s a fool of me, and if my name compels me to attend the lectures of my colleagues, I am ashamed of my inability to understand what is being said. An odd old man who closes his eyes, nods his head, appears to be following the speeches and mutters to himself: ‘I am the school dunce.’ I scribble on my desk. The others think that I am giving all my attention. I am doing nothing.

  From suffering I gain one advantage; it calls me constantly to order. The long periods in which I used to think of nothing, only letting words float around in me: chair, lamp, door, or other objects over which my eyes were roaming, these long periods of vacancy no longer exist. Pain harasses me and I must think to distract myself from it. It is the opposite of Descartes. I am, therefore I think. Without pain I was not.

  What will be the end of my torment? Shall I live it to the end? Shall I emerge from it? Are these not the afflictions of age beginning? Are they accidental, these phenomena, or normal? It is this too that saves me from rebellion and makes me bear my complaints in patience. I do not want to add to my absurdities that of believing myself to be a young man, prematurely stricken.