The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau

  * In the long run the line of the music and that of the dance, which contradict one another, incline towards each other and blend. Dancers who had complained of the clash but had grown accustomed to it, come to the point of complaining that there is too much accord. They ask me to change the basic music. I have decided for New York to alternate to Bach’s Passacaglia with the Overture to Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Thus I shall prove how far the eye takes precedence over the ear in the theatre, and that works as widely different as these can adapt themselves to the same theme. But what is done is done and my guess is that it will not now be changed. The bag is much travelled. The things in it have rubbed off their corners and sleep has relaxed their attitudes. They lazily subside.

  ON RESPONSIBILITY

  NOW HERE IS THIS WEIRD SENSATION OF DEADLOCK beginning to grip me at the four cardinal points of my system and to knot itself at the centre. Is it the sudden heat or the storm, or the loneliness, or the uncertainty over the dates for my play, or the prospect of being homeless, or is it simply that this book refuses to go any further? I know these attacks of vague anguish, having often been their victim. Nothing is harder than to give them a shape that will allow us to look them in the face. From the moment this malaise appears, it dominates us. It does not allow us to read, write, sleep, walk, to live. It surrounds us with obscure threats. All that was opening closes. All that was helping deserts us. All that smiled looks on us icily. We dare not take a step. The ventures suggested to us wilt, become entangled, capsize over one another. Each time I let myself be caught by these advances of fate, which only lure us on the better to desert us. Each time I tell myself that I have reached calm waters, that I have paid dearly enough for the right to descend a gentle slope, and no longer slide headlong in the night.

  No sooner am I lulled by this illusion than my body calls me to order. It switches on one of those red lights signifying Danger. Sufferings that I believed to have disappeared return with the anger of those who have made a false exit and bear us a further grudge for having appeared ridiculous. My eyelids, my temples, my neck, my chest, my shoulders, my arms, my knuckles, devour me. The Morzine farce begins again. I get better and the malady thereby gains strength. It even seems to want to attack my mucous membrane, my gums, my throat, my palate. From the works it passes into the fuel and pollutes it. Patches of irritation, gum-boils of misery, fevers of despair, fill us with slight but most distressing symptoms. They grow quickly into a kind of nausea that we attribute to outside influence. It is probably our own condition colouring the world and making us think it responsible for our own colour. This jiggery-pokery only messes up my outside and my inside still further. Life appears to us insoluble, too vast, too small, too long, too short. Once, as a palliative for these constantly recurring attacks, I used to take opium, a remedy inducing euphoria. I gave it up ten years ago, on account of an honesty which is perhaps only foolishness. I wished to rely on my own resources alone, which does not make sense, since our inner self is made up of what we feed upon. In short, nothing is left to me but to endure these attacks and wait for the outcome.

  The one inhabiting me since yesterday announced itself a fortnight ago by a fresh outbreak of my ills. I should like to consider the sultry heat turning to thunder an additional factor. For the last five minutes it has been blowing and raining. I remember a paragraph in Michelet’s L’Histoire in which he congratulates himself on being untroubled by the squalls beating against his window. On the contrary he derived comfort from them and observed in them the rhythm of nature. These squalls held for him a promise of fine weather. What fine weather? I wonder. I should like to be my own tuner and tighten up my nerves to my own pitch when heat or frost have sent me out of tune. What am I saying? The slightest moral dampness, the slightest mental feverishness.

  Should one envy those great ogres like Goethe or like Hugo in whom egoism passes for heroism and who manage to make people admire such monstrous sayings as: ‘Pardessus les tombes, en avant’? It is thus that Goethe receives the news of his son’s death. What matters whether we envy them or do not envy them? The die is cast. And I add nothing to my glory nor to theirs by being cast in one mould or another.

  But I assure you that it is the way I am made that I have to thank for being a rolling stone. The place I hoped for and in which I hide quickly becomes a trap. I escape from it and thus it goes on. I have only to discover a place of retreat, for everything to conspire against me and prevent me from signing the contract.

  Nothing is so rigid as this rhythm that bears us along and that we imagine to be under our control. Its impetus deceives us. Failure is masked by it. It never shows itself twice with the same face. However much we expect it, we do not recognize it.

  Has the book I am writing completed its curve? I who boast, and in these very chapters, that I never worry about this, and that I am never warned of it except by a sudden shock, now, for the first time, am questioning myself. Shall I be able to go on talking to you always and keeping this journal—which, as is the way of journals, is not one—based on what happens to me? It would be to tamper with its mechanism. It would be not to write the book that comes to me, but another one which I would be forcing. I surrender to the trickery of a station platform where one runs the length of the train, where one jumps onto the footboard, where one tries to delay the breaking of the thread wound round one’s own heart and that of those who are departing. I find myself torn between my taste for regular habits and the fatality that compels me to break them. I had come to imagine us so clearly, youth matching my youth, standing at a street corner, sitting in a square, lying face down on a bed, elbows on a table, gossiping together. And I leave you. Without leaving you, needless to say, since I am so closely merged with my ink that my pulse beats into it. Do you not feel it under your thumb, as it holds the corner of the pages? That would astonish me, since it throbs under my pen and produces that inimitable, wild, nocturnal, ultra-complex hubbub of my heart, recorded in Le Sang d’un Poète. ‘The poet is dead. Long live the poet.’ This is the cry of his ink. This is what his muffled drums beat out. This is what lights his funeral candelabra. This is what shakes the pocket in which you put my book and makes passers-by turn their heads and wonder what the noise is. This is the whole difference between a book that is simply a book and this book, which is a person changed into a book. Changed into a book and crying out for help, for the spell to be broken and he reincarnated in the person of the reader. This is the sleight-of-hand I ask of you. Please understand me. It is not so difficult as it seems at first sight.

  You take this book out of your pocket. You read. And if you manage to read it without anything being able to distract you from my writing, little by little you will feel that I inhabit you and you will resurrect me. You may even chance to use a gesture of mine, a glance of mine. Naturally I am addressing the youth of a period when I shall no longer be there in flesh and bone nor my blood mingled with my ink.

  We are in full agreement. Do not forget that my pen strokes, now become printed letters, must reform in you their convolutions momentarily entwining your line with mine, to such a degree as to ensure an exchange of warmth between us.

  If you follow my instructions to the letter, the phenomenon of osmosis will occur, owing to which this somewhat noxious parcel, which is a book, ceases to be so, thanks to a pact of mutual assistance by which the living help the dead and the dead help the living. Let us say no more about it.

  This evening, while addressing the children of our children’s children, I am suffering from a pretty unpleasant complaint. Between the middle and ring finger of my right hand the skin is peeling. Under my arms there are clumps of nettles. I force myself to write, because idleness increases my torture tenfold. And that is why I project myself into a time when it will be my pages’ turn to suffer. Which they may perhaps do. For ink as persuasive as mine can never be quite at peace.

  Oh how I should love to be well! To produce plays, films, poems by the armful. So to toughen the flesh of
my paper that pain could not get its teeth into it.

  And how I complained! Of what? Of influenza. Of neuritis. Of typhoid. Of a fair duel with death. I was forgetting that insidious ailment that destroys us just as man destroys the earth, laboriously. The stealthy strike in my factory. The broken parts than cannot be replaced. I was forgetting my age, that is all there is to it.

  Jean Genêt, who must surely be regarded as a moralist one day, paradoxical as this may seem, since we are in the habit of confusing the moralist with the moralizer, a few weeks ago said these poignant words to me: ‘To watch our heroes live and to pity them is not enough. We must take their sins upon ourselves and suffer the consequences.’

  Who are my real heroes? Emotions. Abstract figures who none the less live and whose demands are exacting. This is what I came to understand when listening to Genêt and noting the ravages wrought in his soul by the crimes of L’Egyptien Querelle.* He knew himself to be responsible and rejected any plea of irresponsibility. He was ready, not to consider an action being brought against the effrontery of his book, but to endorse any action which a higher court might bring against his characters.†

  At one stroke he throws a great light for me over the endless trial in which I find myself involved. At one stroke he explains to me the reason why I experience no sense of revolt. In this indictment bearing on words, attitudes, hallucinations, it is right for the author to accept responsibility and to appear at the bar between two policemen. It is out of the question for an author to judge, to have a seat on the bench at his own trial and incline to compassion for the guilty. A man is on one side or the other of the bar. This is the very basis of our commitment.

  Were I not of the breed that is always accused and ill-equipped for defence, what shame I should have felt before Genêt when he confided to me the secret of his torment. For that matter, would he have confided it to me had he not recognized me, long ago and at first sight, by those signs which enable outlaws to recognize one another? I had seen Genêt refuse to be introduced to a famous writer whose immorality appeared to him suspect.

  It is essential that I should state openly in advance that I stand by my own ideas, however contradictory they may be, and that mankind’s Court of Justice can charge nobody but me. They take shape, I repeat, as characters. They take action. I alone am responsible for their actions. I should be ashamed to say, like Goethe, after the suicides brought about by Werther: ‘This is no concern of mine.’

  It is therefore natural that I should shoulder the judicial errors to which ideas, easy to distort and without an alibi, will always give rise.‡

  I do not for a moment conceal from myself 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. I exonerate them, far-fetched though the verdict may be. It would be too simple if one could move around with impunity ignoring laws in a world regulated by them.§

  5 July 1946

  * Refers to Querelle de Brest by Jean Genêt. E.S.

  † In order to ‘place’ Jean Genêt in the eyes of the Court of Justice (1942) I told this Court that I considered him to be one of France’s great writers. One can guess how the newspapers under the Occupation gloated over the whole business. But a Paris Court is always afraid of repeating some famous blunder, of condemning Baudelaire. I saved Genêt. And I do not withdraw any of my evidence.

  ‡ It sometimes happens in this world that public judicial redress is made. Condemned for incest in 1939 by the Municipal Council and in 1941 by the Militia, the mother and the son in Les Parents Terribles, perfectly pure and childlike, were unanimously acquitted as a result of an appeal in 1946.

  § I know very well what will be said about this book. The author’s preoccupation with himself is exasperating. Who is not thus preoccupied? The critics to begin with, who no longer judge objectively, but only in relation to themselves. A phenomenon in an age in league against the individual, who in consequence will only individualize himself further, in that spirit of contradiction that makes the world go round and particularly France.

  POSTSCRIPT

  HERE YOU ARE THEN, CURED AND INTREPID. Intrepid and stupid, tossed about in the confusion you abhor, always in flight from something, flying towards something, your sledge surrounded with snow and with wolves on your track.

  Here you are, cured and alone, returning to winter in this big empty house where you were writing this book, with a family around you. You were writing this book, whose first proofs you are correcting, of which you now understand next to nothing.

  Intrepid and stupid, encumbered with tasks that lead you into more tasks, trying to reach a target that you decorate like a Christmas tree.

  Have you any right to Christmas and to a quiet home? Have you any right to pen these quiet works that judge men and condemn them to death?

  The other evening, during a conversation at table, you discovered how old you were. You did not even know that, because you cannot count properly and you did not in any way connect the date of your birth and the year we have reached. Something in you was dumbfounded. This something spread perniciously through your whole system until you said to yourself: ‘I am old.’ You would doubtless have preferred to hear yourself say: ‘You are young’, and to believe what flatterers tell you.

  Intrepid and stupid you should have made up your mind. This limits the difficulty of being, since for those who embrace a cause, anything outside it is non-existent.

  But all causes appeal to you. You have not wished to deny yourself a single one. You have chosen to slip between them all and get the sledge through.

  Right then, intrepid spirit, straighten yourself out! Forward, intrepid and stupid! Run the risk of being to the very end.

  NOTE

  WRITTEN AFTER

  ‘THE EAGLE WITH TWO HEADS’.

  I HAD DECIDED (SOMETHING WITHIN ME TO BE precise had decided) to embark on a work in which psychology would in a way be absent. Psychology proper would give place to a heroic or heraldic psychology. To put it plainly the psychology of our heroes would bear as little relation to real psychology as do unicorns and lions in tapestries to real animals. Their behaviour (lions’ laughter, unicorns carrying banners) would belong to the theatre as these fabulous beasts belong to a coat of arms. Such a work had, of its nature, to be invisible, illegible in short to psychologists. To make it visible I needed sets, costumes, Edwige Feuillière and Jean Marais. That is to say the colour and fragrance of flowers. This was necessary for the organic vegetation of the work so that the carriers—I mean the audience—should spread my pollen.

  Art is worthless in my opinion unless it be the projection of some ethic. All else is decoration. It is right to regard a work as decorative if this is lacking, in an age when decoration seduces both the eye and the ear.

  Rimbaud has drained the theme of the written curse to the very dregs. The curse (which solitude and state of health should be called) must then lose the attributes that made it recognizable at first glance, and present the artist with the false attitude it entails, in a new form.

  Success and lack of success can serve our loneliness in the same way. The age we live in settles the matter and compels us instinctively to protect ourselves from respect, whether by apparent failure, or by an appearance of success.

  Since the chapters of this book were written and printed, L’Aigle à Deux Têtes has been produced in the theatre. I made no mistake in the preface, written at the same time as the play. In it I was carrying out a policy similar to that of La Belle et la Bête. A policy comparable with that of an age in which policies and wars played no part, in which our spiritual differences were the only valid policy. (The surrealists and myself for example.)

  The success of the play (due to colour and atmosphere superficial to the work but which draw the public) stands in opposition to all critical judgment solely concerned with art and a prey to habit.

  It must be fully understood that art, I say so once mo
re, does not exist qua art, pure and simple, detached, free, rid of its creator, but is born only of his cry, his laughter, his grief. That is why certain canvases in museums beckon to me and are alive with anguish, while others are dead and present us with nothing but the embalmed corpses of Egypt.

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