undefinedJean Cocteau’s self portrait.

 

A collector had a house full of horrible things. “Do you like these?” Cocteau finally asked. “No. But my parents missed the chance of buying the impressionists cheap because they didn’t like them. I buy only what I don’t like.” A young Netherlander, said Cocteau, was the first to buy the impressionists and take them home. Locked in an insane asylum for fifteen years, he died there. In his trunk were found some of the masterpieces of impressionism, which had by then acquired considerable value. His parents went to the head of the asylum and accused him of having kept a sane man incarcerated.

Cocteau’s vivacity of intelligence caused him to live in a world of accelerated images, as if a film were run in fast motion. One thinks of a different time stage as a real possibility: differing human beings apparently all on the same physical ground living actually at different accelerations. In Cocteau’s case, there was no doubt that a rapidity of intelligence accounted for the multiplication, juxtaposition, proliferation, and mixing of experience and its exterior face, behavior—as well as for what was often called a certain superficiality or légèreté. “He who sees further renders less of what he sees, however much he renders.”

First met on the set of Le Testament d’Orphée in 1959 among the lime rocks, tortured as they are into Cocteauan shapes by the wind, at Les Baux in Provence—significantly on the day he filmed the death of the poet, himself—Cocteau treated the interviewer to a glimpse into a life that bridges two epochs (Proust and Rostand to Picasso and Stravinsky). He chatted with eminent grace between takes, then went over to stretch out again (upon a tarpaulin laid down out of camera range) on the floor of the quarried-out cavern in rock, lit up eerily by the floodlights, to be the transpierced poet—a spear through his breast (actually built around his breast on an iron hoop under his jacket). The hands gripped the spear; the talc-white face from the age of Diderot became anguished.

The taped interview took place in the Riviera villa of Mme. Alec Weisweiller a few months before Cocteau’s death in the fall of 1963. The villa entrance was framed by facsimiles of two great Etruscan masks from his staging of his Oedipus Rex—a kind of static opera in scenes which he wrote after music by Stravinsky—masks worked in mosaic into the cement walk that winds through gardenia bushes and lilies to the portal out on the point of Cap Ferrat. You saw the schooner-form yacht of Niarchos out on the water toward Villefranche, where Cocteau lived in the Hotel Welcome in 1925 with Christian Bérard and wrote Orphée; the poet was framed by his own tapestry of Judith and Holofernes, which covers the whole of one of Mme. Weisweiller’s dining terrace walls, and provokes strange reminiscences of the slumbering Roman soldiery in the “Resurrection” of Piero della Francesca. Lunch was preceded by a cocktail, mixed by the famous hands, which Cocteau said he had learned to make from a novel by Peter Cheyney: “white rum, curaçao, and some other things.” Lunch finished, the recorder was plugged in.    

JEAN COCTEAU

After you have written a thing and you reread it, there is always the temptation to fix it up, to improve it, to remove its poison, blunt its sting. No—a writer prefers, usually, in his work the resemblances—how it accords with what he has read. His originality—himself—is not there, of course.  

INTERVIEWER

When I brought forward your resemblance to Voltaire at lunch you were—I had better say “highly displeased.” But you share Voltaire’s rapidity of thought.  

COCTEAU

I am very French—like him. Very, very French.  

INTERVIEWER

My thought was Voltaire isn’t as dry-sharp as is supposed: that this is a miscalculation owing to imputing to him what would be a thought-out hypercleverness in a more lethargic mind. But in fact Voltaire wrote very fast—Candide in three days. That holocaust of sparks was simply thrown off. Whether or not this is true of Voltaire, it is certainly true of you.  

COCTEAU

Tiens! I am the antipode of Voltaire! He is all thought—intellect. I am nothing—“another” speaks in me. This force takes the form of intelligence, and this is my tragedy—and it always has been from the beginning.  

INTERVIEWER

It takes us rather far to think you are victimized by intelligence, especially since for a half century you have been thought of as one of the keenest critical and critical-poetical intelligences in France; but doesn’t this bear on something you told me about yourself and Proust—that you both got started wrong?  

COCTEAU

We both came out of the dandyism of the end of the nineteenth century. I turned my vest, eventually, toward 1912, but in the proper sense—in the right direction. Yet I am afraid the taint has persisted even to today. I suppressed all my earlier books of poems—from before 1913—and they are not in my collected works. Though I suppose that, after all, something from that epoch has always …

Marcel combated those things in his own way. He would circle among his victims collecting his “black honey,” his miel noir—he asked me once, “I beg of you, Jean, since you live in the rue d’Anjou in the same building with Mme. de Chevigné, of whom I’ve made the Duchesse de Guermantes; I entreat you to get her to read my book. She won’t read me; and she says she stubs her foot in my sentences. I beg you—” I told him that was as if he asked an ant to read Fabre. You don’t ask an insect to read entomology.  

INTERVIEWER

Strictly statistically, you were born in 1889. How could it have happened that you entered into this child-protégé phase, so very like Voltaire, taken up by all Paris? Did you have some roots in the arts—in your family, for example?  

COCTEAU

No. We lived at Maisons-Laffitte, a few miles outside Paris; played tennis at this house and that, and were divided into two camps over the Dreyfus affair. My father painted a little, an amateur—my grandfather had collected Stradivari and some excellent paintings.  

INTERVIEWER

Excuse me. Do you think the loss of your father in your first year bears on your accomplishment? There is a whole theory that genius is only-childism, and you were brought up by women, by your mother. An exceedingly beautiful one, from her pictures.  

COCTEAU

I can only reply to that that I have never felt any connection with my family. There is—I must say simply—something in me that is not in my family. That was not visible in my father or mother. I do not know its origin.  

INTERVIEWER

What happened in those days after you were launched?  

COCTEAU

I had met Edouard de Max, the theater manager and actor, and Sarah Bernhardt, and others then called the “sacred monsters” of Paris, and in 1908 de Max and Bernhardt hired the Théâtre Fémina in the Champs-Élysées for an evening of reading of my poems.  

INTERVIEWER

How old were you then?  

COCTEAU

Eighteen. It was the fourth of April, 1908. I became nineteen three months later. I then came to know Proust, the Comtesse de Noailles, the Rostands. The next year, with Maurice Rostand, I became director of the deluxe magazine Schéhérazade.  

INTERVIEWER

Sarah Bernhardt. Edmond—the Rostand who wrote Cyrano. It seems like another century. Then?  

COCTEAU

I was on a slope that led straight toward the Académie Française (where, incidentally, I have finally arrived; but for inverse reasons); and then, at about that time, I met Gide. I was pleasing myself by tracing arabesques; I took my youth for audacity and mistook witticism for profundity. But something from Gide, not very clearly then, made me ashamed.  

INTERVIEWER

I recall something particularly scintillating you wrote in your first novel, Potamak, begun in 1914—though I think you didn’t finish and publish it until after the war—which must have been ironically autobiographical of that stage.  

COCTEAU

Yes, Potomak was published in 1919 and 1924.