Past Tense, by Jean Cocteau
Stove, R. J.
octeau, like the Sitwells, can so easily be slotted into a particular historical niche that generation after generation has been provided with the best possible excuse for never actually bothering...
...I see the date approaching with fear and trembling...
...annoyance at the seeming apostasies of Proust and Mauriac: none of these emotions, except the last, is allowed to rock his fundamental equipoise for more than four lines or so...
...Is there a sheer animal vigor about the British literary muse, that endows even its second-raters with an ebullience denied to the second raters of any Continental nation...
...From the stock literary vices of homosexuals he is signally free...
...a rather morbid love for dogs (his least French characteristic...
...If Cocteau's seeming inability to stick to his topic were the result of some medical condition, like the stroke which left Mencken aphasic in his last years, one could only mutter suitably appalled condolences and resolve to find a worthier target for one's spleen: in fact Past Tense proffers no more evidence than do Cocteau's biographers of serious ill health, and much evidence of unusual toughness...
...How to explain its principal shortcoming...
...octeau, like the Sitwells, can so easily be slotted into a particular historical niche that generation after generation has been provided with the best possible excuse for never actually bothering about his work...
...I feel younger than when I was young" and "I enjoy growing old" are how he sums up his Weltanschauung...
...we should have been more astounded had we known that this diary was not merely a lovingly inscribed album of paedophile exotica, or a blow-by-blow account of soporific faction-fighting between the Anarcho-Trotskyo-Surrealists and the Surrealo-Trotskyo-Anarchists, but a humane and disappointing chronicle that could easily be taken for the work of an adult...
...It cannot very well be ascribed to the diary format: each entry in James Agate's nine-volume diary Ego—the work of a fellow-bohemian and fellow-deviant, completed shortly before Past Tense starts—is as tightly organized a piece of prose as one could reasonably want...
...Past Tense (Le Passe' D4fini was what Cocteau himself called it) begins abruptly in July 1951 and ends equally abruptly in December 1952: further volumes, doubtless similarly inconclusive in their cut-off points, are promR. J. Stove's articles frequently appear in the Australian magazines Quadrant and 24 Hours...
...Cocteau's paragraphs are generally no more than five or six sentences long, and the sentences themselves are of Hemingwayan terseness...
...Finished the work on Gide with Colin-Simard...
...She was widow of the banker Bischoffsheim (MarieLaure de Noailles' father), and her second husband was the writer Francis de Croisset...
...I am having difficulty figuring out what to do with Oedipus Rex...
...NT et while it is patently absurd to .1 saddle Cocteau with the blame for such verbiage, it is equally absurd to deny that in all but a very few pages of Past Tense he may well be said to have asked for such treatment...
...Or so it appeared to those among us whose knowledge of French, and therefore of French culture, stopped at what Wodehouse magisterially deemed the eskervous-avez stage...
...Here the weather is murky...
...Did Cocteau's treatment at the hands of the Resistance ("the Liberation, the shame of France, has been the Saint Bartholomew's Massacre of values") frighten him more lastingly than he even admitted...
...ised...
...We should, have been astounded had we guessed that Cocteau possessed enough bourgeois application to keep a private diary (Past Tense's very existence only came to light some five years ago...
...As things are, the book stands as far less of an entity than many stupider efforts...
...traces of intermittent despondency at the decline of craftsmanship in the arts...
...Has French literature, however unofficial, been permanently leached by the Academy...
...but there is no reason why his paragraphs should not be all one-sentence ones, or alternatively fifty-sentence ones, since any connection between form and subject matter has been visibly dumped into the too-hard basket...
...Were it not for-that fatal diffuseness, compared to which the labyrinthine dialectics of Cocteau's former friend Ezra Pound are a Roman road of straightforward argument, criticism of Past Tense would appear even more caddish than it already does...
...Moreover it's a work which has to be accompanied by harsh scenic effects...
...Yes, the furnishings of Cocteau's mental habitat were a bit nineteentwenties-ish, but he liked them...
...This is actually one of Cocteau's most coherent passages: A message from Aragon for the homage to Chaplin...
...His public image came increasingly to resemble that of the man in the New Yorker cartoon who covered the walls of his apartment with the digits one, nine, five, and zero: and whose response to perplexed visitors was "Yes, it is a bit nineteen-fifties-ish, but I like it...
...as the man who just happened to invent modern French cinematography in an idle moment after breakfast...
...He has become totally unafraid of what the modish may think of him, going so far at several moments as to express an ardent and quite un-Camp love for the elder Dumas's novels...
...He clearly had a distinguished if watery intelligence, when he could be bothered to use it, and (the illustrations to Past Tense bring home to one anew) a style of draftsmanship which can be recognized at fifty paces...
...Nor can it be attributed to Cocteau's rare versatility in the verbal and visual arts: such versatility did nothing to sap the authorial energies of that other writer-painter from the same vintage, Wyndham Lewis...
...He was sensible enough to be disgusted by Genet: and while he did plead on Genet's behalf at the latter's trial for burglary, his dominant attitude towards the younger author was expressed by Auden's lines, "The Marquis de Sade and Genet/Are most highly thought of today;/But torture and treachery/Are not my sort of lechery/So I've given my copies away...
...Yesterday it was snowing in Paris...
...And Past Tense is not afflicted with the sort of lacerating self-hatred that would be expected from a present-day ex-junkie's writings: it is mostly the work of a man at peace with himself, or as much at peace with himself as is compatible with putting words on paper in the first place...
...It is symptomatic that in August 1953—eight months, in other words, after Past Tense finishes—he should apparently have felt the need to exhort his future executors, "Omit what is [sic] no more than memoranda, as well as repetitions caused by my forgetting I have already told what I am telling...
...The man's inherent harmlessness, exceptional for a modernist maitre, is striking...
...A momentary surge of panic about the atom bomb...
...His mind was so full of observations, hardly any of which are innately foolish, that he could seldom keep the subject of a sentence in his head long enough to remember it by the time he got around to penning the predicate...
...With annotators like that, Cocteau may well be reflecting as he spins in his tombeau, who needs book reviewers...
...but thanks partly to the kind ministrations of none other than Jacques Maritain, let it be said to both men's honor, he was eventually detoxed...
...PAST TENSE: THE COCTEAU DIARIES, VOLUME ONE Jean Cocteau/Harcourt Brace Jovanovich/$19.95 R. J. Stove 48 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 1988...
...Such commendable concern for the niceties of structure would have been more impressive if Cocteau's forgetfulness had not extended to his actual syntax...
...His humility prompted him to coin the almost Augustan epitaph, addressed to posterity, Je reste avec vous...
...Not to mention that other, much less publicized Cocteau: the Cocteau who belied his later reputation as the ideologue of frivolity by pseudonymously driving an ambulance on the Western front in World War I, and who further belied it when (on October 11, 1963, at the age of seventy-four) he died from a heart-attack induced by the news of Edith Piaf's death...
...And from Georges Simenon, who comes to Monte Carlo Tuesday, staying with Pagnol...
...It would be hard for the literate to go through life altogether ignorant of Cocteau's persona: as Num6ro Un pederast in what could once be called Gay Paree, as slavish acolyte at the altar of Le Jazz Hot, as goad and guardian to that bunch of composers known collectively as Les Six, as the impresario who spent his whole career living up to Diaghilev's terrible injunction "Etonne-moi...
...The guess is anybody's, and the questions are not at all rhetorical: for Past Tense does scant justice to the novelist who created Les Enfants Terribles, the dramatist who created La Machine Infernale, or the film-maker who created Orphie...
...That last name, unelucidated save in the index (its owner turns out to have been Cocteau's secretary), fittingly exemplifies how the effect of Cocteau's discursiveness is aggravated by Past Tense's annotator: most proper names are not explained at all (as in the above example), or explained to excess (someof us actually know who Tallulah Bankhead was), or equipped with such unreadable resumes as "Daughter of Countess Adheaume de Chevigne (the model for Proust's Duchesse de Guermantes), and the mother of MarieLaure de Noailles...
...Cocteau may have been, as Ned Rorem asserts in his introduction, "the world's most conspicuous opiomane" since De Quincey...
...The sense of disappointment springs less from any overt faults than from Cocteau's infinite distractability...
...As for retaining the thread of an argument for a whole paragraph, forget it...
...I wonder what good it is, presenting such a work to such audiences—the kind of rich seople who see nothing, hear nothing...
...a ludicrous alarm at the realization that he never dreams about cigarettes, although to his waking self Gauloises are indispensable...
Vol. 21 • March 1988 • No. 3
