The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  Beauty in art is a stratagem that she uses to immortalize herself. She travels, she pauses on her way, she fertilizes human minds. Artists provide her with a vehicle. They do not know her. It is by them and outside them that she pursues her mission. Should they try to get hold of her by force, they only produce an artifice.

  Beauty, simple servant of a nuptial system, oblivious of herself, battens on a painter, for instance, and will not let him go. This often leads to disaster for the progeny of certain creators who claim to procreate in a carnal way and play a double role. Let no one think that beauty lacks a critical faculty nor that she is proof of one. Neither the one nor the other. She goes straight to the point, whatever that may be.

  She always seeks out those who espouse her, thus ensuring her survival.

  Her lightning, striking the high points, sets fire to works that shock. She shuns banal representations of nature.

  The cult of the banal representation of nature is so deeply rooted in man that he loves it, even in painters for whom it only serves as a springboard. When this representation, painted with equal precision, offers him anecdotes from dreams or from imagination, he rebels. Such an anecdote no longer concerns him but concerns another. His egoism rejects it. He sits in judgment. He condemns. The crime is to have tried to distract him from his self-absorption.

  Just as people do not read but read themselves, he does not look, he looks at himself.

  Art comes into existence the moment the artist departs from nature. What makes him depart gives him the right to live. This becomes a La Palice truism.‡

  But the departure can occur indiscernibly. (I am thinking of Vermeer and of certain very young modern painters.) That is to reach the height of art. There beauty slips in by stealth. She sets a perfect trap, as innocent-looking as a plant’s. She will slyly lure people to herself without rousing the fear that her Gorgon’s head always does arouse.

  Diderot exasperates me when he describes Greuze’s anecdotes in detail. Baudelaire would aggravate me by describing those of Delacroix were he not fertilized by this painter. Dante set the trap for Delacroix. Delacroix set the trap for Baudelaire. The phenomenon can be seen with the naked eye in the Delacroix-Balzac fertilization (La Fille aux yeux d’Or).

  From century to century the Giaconda lures a swarm of gazers into those traps that Leonardo believed he had laid solely to catch the beauty of his model.

  At the cinematograph, every film, thanks to the absence of colour, escapes the commonplace and accidentally enjoys the privilege of a work of art. Beauty ventures there as rarely as possible. Colour will ruin this ambiguity. All will be ugly but the beautiful.

  People shun coloured films because they do not find them close enough to nature. Once again it is in its very divorce from it that colour will reign and that beauty will make use of it.

  The reproductive instinct urges the poet to scatter his seeds beyond his boundaries.

  I repeat it: poorly transmitted, they fructify. Certain species (Pushkin) refuse transmission. But this does not prevent them from scattering at large and even when reduced to insignificance, from fructifying.

  Shakespeare remains the model of the explosive plant. His seeds have taken advantage of wings, and storms. Beauty is hurled across the world on tongues of fire.

  Were we able to measure the distance separating us from those whom we believe to be nearest, we would be frightened. Mutual goodwill is made up of laziness, courtesy, lies, of a multitude of things that conceal the barricades from us. Even a tacit agreement involves such disagreement over details and itineraries that there is excuse enough here for us to get lost and be separated for ever. If we meet a mind that seems to us propelled by the same mechanism as our own and are amazed at its swiftness in traversing the zones with which we are concerned, we learn later that it specializes in, for example, music, and this proves what a mirage it was that seemed to bring it close to us. Sentiment has carried it far from intelligence. It is no longer in control. Some weakness, let in at an early stage, that it has every moment cajoled, fortified and worked on ever since, has ended by developing the muscles of an athlete and choking off the rest. Here is a spirit capable of understanding everything, which understands nothing. The use of what attracted us remains nil. This strong-minded individual loves bad music and devotes himself to it. Deaf to true riches he is no longer free on this vital point. Along any other path he travels with ease. An atrophied limb is the only one he uses and the melancholy sight of this atrophy fills him with pride.

  Of graver import is our apparent agreement all along the line. This is what enables us to live and what art exploits in order to persuade us to serve its cause. A work of art is so intensely the expression of our solitude that one wonders what strange necessity for making contact impels an artist to expose it to the light.

  A work of art, through the medium of which a man heroically exposes himself, perhaps quite unconsciously, evinces another form of heroism and will strike root in others by means of subterfuges comparable to those nature uses to perpetuate itself. Does a work of art hold an indispensable hierarchy, or has man imitatively conformed in the long run to the universal methods of creation? It is certain that he is a slave to them, that, without knowing it, he clothes his creative force in decorative apparel fit to bear witness to his presence, to intrigue, to startle, to seduce, to survive at whatever cost by signals totally unconnected with its mission and by the same artifice as that of flowers.

  A work of art carries its defence within itself. This is made up of numerous unconscious concessions that allow it to conquer habit and to implant itself through a misconception. Thanks to having got this hold, it clings fast and its secret seed gets to work.

  An artist can expect no help from his peers. Any art form which is not his own must be intolerable to him and upsets him to the highest degree. I have seen Claude Debussy ill at the orchestral rehearsals of Le Sacre. His soul was discovering its splendour. The form that he had given to his soul was suffering from another that did not accord with its own contours. Therefore no help. Neither from our peers nor from a mob incapable of consenting without revolt to a violent break with the habits it had begun to form. Whence will help come? From no one. And it is then that art begins to use the obscure stratagems of nature in a kingdom which resists it, which even seems to fight it or to turn its back upon it.

  I have a friend who is a typical example of this. His contribution is incalculable. His name is Jean Genêt. No one had armed himself better against contacts, no one guarded his solitude better. However, it is precisely penal servitude, eroticism, a whole new psychology, a physiological one so to speak, a whole arsenal of resistance, that earns him contact, fascinates and attracts those who appear most rebellious. For his genius projects forcefully powers which, displayed by talent, would be no more than ‘picturesque’. He dumbly obeys the order to scatter his seeds. The trick has come off. Faithful to its old method, beauty dons the mask of a criminal. I ponder this before a photograph of Weidmann§ given me by Genêt. Swathed in bandages, he is so beautiful that one wonders if crime does not employ the universal stratagem and if this is not one of its methods of luring what it kills, of exciting its converts, of exercising a sinister prestige, in short of perpetuating itself.

  Is man capable of penetrating the mystery which I am analysing and of becoming its master? No, technique itself is a snare. Wilde rightly observes that technique is only individuality. The technicians in my film La Belle et la Bête credited me with first class technique. I have none. In fact there is none. Doubtless they give the name technique to the feats of equilibrium that the mind instinctively brings into play every second, so as not to break its neck. This is what Picasso’s great phrase sums up: ‘Le métier, c’est ce qui ne s’apprend pas.’

  But I insist. We have to live shoulder to shoulder with minds where the space separating us is gloomier than that of atoms and stars. This is of what a theatre audience, before which we brazenly expose ourselves, is composed. There is
the void into which we send our poems, our drawings, our reviews. There is the park buzzing with insects intent on their food and which the world’s factory employs for other ends.

  For, while admitting that some of these insects might have opinions, this does not upset the rule. This rule is robust enough to stand a few exceptions. It relies on grand totals. It works wholesale. Its prodigality is dispensed with both hands. It is ignorant of the code. That a great number of its balls go astray matters little to it. It is rich in them. It aims to put one ball into the hole.

  * I have referred to Beauty throughout this essay in the feminine. E.S.

  † Bitches mount dogs. Cows mount each other. This disorder is sometimes an order. The natives of the islands made it a rule before the missionaries came. It was a matter of avoiding over-population.

  ‡ Jacques de Chabannes, 1470–1525, Seigneur de la Palice, Maréchal de France. Later a song perpetuated the legend of his ingenuousness, giving rise to the expression une verité de la Palice. E.S.

  § A notorious criminal of the 1930s. E.S.

  ON CUSTOMS

  WRITING IS AN ACT OF LOVE. IF IT IS NOT IT IS only handwriting. It consists in obeying the driving force of plants and trees and in broadcasting sperm far around us. The richness of the world is in its wastefulness. This germinates, that falls by the wayside. Thus it is with sex. The centre of pleasure is very vague, albeit very keen. It invites the race to perpetuate itself. This does not prevent it from functioning blindly. A dog espouses my leg. A bitch gets to work on a dog. A certain plant, once tall, now atrophied, still contrives a parachute for its seed that hits the ground before it can open. Women in the Pacific Islands give birth on a dung heap so that only strong children survive. From fear of over-population these islands favour what are usually considered evil practices.

  Soldiers, sailors, labourers, who practise them, see no evil in them. Vice, I once wrote, begins with choice. At Villefranche in the old days I watched American sailors, for whom the practice of love assumed no precise form, and who made do with anybody or anything. The idea of vice never crossed their minds. They acted blindly. They conformed instinctively to the very confused rules of the animal and vegetable kingdom. A fruitful woman becomes misshapen with use, which proves her nobility and that it is more insane to use her in a sterile way than for a man merely to provide a luxury for the blind desires of the flesh. Such things mean little to me, but as I like the society of young people, from whom I have a great deal to learn, and as a beautiful soul is reflected in the face, the world has decided otherwise. Besides, I think that after a certain age such things are depraved, do not allow of any exchange and accordingly become ludicrous, whether it’s a question of one sex or the other.

  In fact I lead the life of a monk. An incomprehensible life in a life in which people think of nothing but of rubbing themselves up against one another, of seeking that kind of pleasure, if only in dancing, in imputing it to others, in considering any friendship suspect.

  No matter. We should not be on show. The more mistaken people are about us, the more they envelope us in legends, the better this shelters us and teaches us to live in peace. It is enough that our own circle should hold us in esteem. What we are to other circles is nothing to us.

  A lady whom I had invited to luncheon served me up such a description of myself that I rose from the table to make my apologies. ‘You are sharing,’ I told her, ‘the meal of someone whom I do not know and whom I would not care to know.’ This lady thought she was being agreeable. Doubtless my personality would have given her nothing to hold on to. She knew another, constructed from this, that and the other, which thrilled her.

  Where does the sense of beauty, I mean what impels us towards beauty, have its source? Where does it begin? Where does it end? What nerve centre makes it known to us? The spontaneous use of sexuality haunts all men of stature, whether they know it or not. Michelangelo manifests this to us. Da Vinci whispers it to us. I am less intrigued by their confessions than by the innumerable signs of an order deemed a disorder, and which is not carried to the point of action. What do actions mean? They are matters for the police. They do not interest us. Picasso is an example of this order. This woman’s man is a misogynist in his works. In them he takes revenge for the domination women wield over him and for the time they filch from him. He relentlessly attacks their faces and their costumes. Man, on the other hand, he flatters, and, having nothing to complain of in him, he praises him with pen and pencil.

  ON LINE

  I COULD HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY ABOUT ANY number of subjects that occur to me. But I resist on principle. A certain preoccupation provides me with a framework, and to move out of this would be to be lost. Where should I stop? I should be like those painters who paint the frame (and why not the wall and the building?) like those Hungarian gypsies who would come down from the platform, play from table to table and who might as well have continued in the street.

  For several years I have been moving away from the novel, in a period of interminable novels, in which the readers skip paragraphs and can no longer enter into the adventures of others without exhaustion.

  I have always avoided surnames in my plays and almost always in my books. They embarrass me like too pressing an invitation to intrude among strangers. I was waiting for two new enterprises to obsess me: that of a film in which I would plunge into the purifying bath of childhood, that of a book such as I should have liked to carry in my pocket when I was very young and very much alone. I have made the film. It is La Belle et la Bête. I am making the book. It is the one I am now writing.

  After Iphigenie, Goethe declares that his work was finished and that any further ideas would be a gift of fortune. I am inclined to think I have scraped bottom and that nothing remains. All the better if I am wrong. If not, I shall feel no bitterness. For people like to say that we have run dry when they know nothing of our work. They know a fragment or two which they regard as my whole work and look out for the sequel without having to read the beginning. It will be pleasant for me to twiddle my thumbs, to see my work take root, stretch out its branches towards the sunny side and give me shade.

  Now do not go imagining that the preoccupation driving me is of an aesthetic order. It is subject only to the line.

  What is the line? It is life. A line should live at every point on its course in such a way that the presence of the artist makes itself felt more strongly than that of the model. The masses base their judgement upon the line of the model, without understanding that it may disappear in favour of that of the painter, provided that his line lives a life of its own. By line I mean the permanence of personality. For the line exists no less in Renoir, in Seurat, in Bonnard, in those in whom it seems to dissolve in the touch of the brush, as in Matisse or Picasso.

  With the writer the line takes precedence over the matter and the form. It runs through the words that he puts together. It sounds a continuous note, imperceptible to both ear and eye. It is, as it were, the style of the soul, and if this line ceases to have a life of its own, if it only describes an arabesque, the soul is absent and the writing dead. That is why I am for ever saying that the moral progress of an artist is the only progress that matters, since this line slackens as soon as the soul abates its fire. Do not confuse moral progress with morality. Moral progress is but a bracing of the self.

  Protecting the line becomes our therapy as soon as we feel that it is weak or when it splits like a hair in bad condition. One recognizes it even without it signifying. And if our painters were to draw a cross on a sheet of paper I am sure I could tell you who had done it. And if I half-open a book, I recognize it before it is fully open.

  Faced with this revealing line, people look only at its trappings. The more visible it is the less they see it, used as they are to admiring only what adorns it. They come to prefer Ronsard to Villon, Schumann to Schubert, Monet to Cézanne.

  What can they learn from Erik Satie, in whom this adorable line goes naked? From Stravinsky, whose sole
concern is to flay it alive?

  The draperies of Beethoven and Wagner fill them with enthusiasm. They are none the less incapable of seeing the line, pronounced though it is, about which those draperies are wound.

  You will tell me that a man does not display his skeleton, that this would be the direst offence against modesty. But this line is not a skeleton. It devolves from the glance, the tone of voice, the gesture, the bearing, from the whole which makes up the physical personality. It gives evidence of a motive force, over whose source and nature philosophers cannot agree.

  Before a piece of music, a painting, a statue, a poem has begun to speak to us, we have already described its line. It is the line that moves us when an artist decides to break with the visible world and compels his forms to obey him.

  For music, although apparently under no constraint to be representative, in fact is so, in as much as it reproduces what the composer has in mind to say. No other art form can express such nonsense or such banalities. And if the composer departs from what the ear is accustomed to, he angers the public in the same way as does the painter or the writer.

  In the case of the composer, a somewhat rare phenomenon enables us to see the phantom line other than by an extra sense. This occurs when it is embodied in a melody. When a melody embraces the course of the line to the point of being integrated with it.

  When I was composing Oedipus Rex with Stravinsky, we travelled through the Alpes-Maritimes. It was in March. The almond trees were in bloom on the mountains. One evening, when we stopped at a small inn, we counted up those melodies of Faust in which Gounod surpasses himself. They invoke the atmosphere of dreams. Our neighbour at the next table rose and introduced himself. He was the composer’s grandson. He told us that Gounod dreamt these melodies of Faust and that he wrote them down on waking.