Cocteau: Poet or Poseur

...Cocteau: Poet or Poseur THE DIFFICULTY OF BEING Bv Jean Cocteau Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge Coward-McCarm 160 pp $4 50 Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Editoi "Canadian Literature", Author, "The Ctvstal Spirit A Study of George Oiwell" "Astound me, said Diaghilev to young Cocteau Jean Cocteau duly astounded Serge Diaghilev, and devoted the remaining half-century of his life to the art of astonishment When he had exhausted every other device, he astonished the world by competing ferociously for admission to the Academie Francaise—whose uniform he wore with impeccable panache Like Oscar Wilde, Cocteau has suffered after death the diminution that inevitably comes to a writer who placed so much emphasis on showmanship A desperate need to perpetuate his youth, an agonizing desire to march always in the artistic vanguard plagued him constantly, in the last years of his lite, with his mental energies diminishing and psychosomatic illnesses eating at his physical strength, he felt the terrible loneliness of a man ageing out of fashion At one point m his book he tells the story ot Beau Brummel "One fine day Brummel asks King George to rise and pull the bell-cord The bell is enough to wake the rightful king from his brief hypnosis and he shows the king of fashion the door "When kings show poets the door, the poets win When the King of England shows Brummel the door, Brummel is lost" During Cocteau's last years the King—the literary public in France and elsewhere—was beginning to show him the door, and despite the rather facile talk of a Cocteau revival, that door has not been fully re-opened "With it" so many decades and through so many movements, Cocteau is now so far outside the current fashions m writing, theater and the several other arts he followed that his voice seems to reach one's ears from a rapidly receding distance Whether he will make that return to permanent acknowledgment, which usually takes place (it ever) one generation after a writer s death, will depend on whether it was a dandy who was shown the door, or a poet With few writers is it more difficult to make up one's mind, for, as Ned Rorem remarks m his preface to The Difficulty of Being, "Cocteau s sleight-of-hand dissembled a lack of discrimination More than anyone else he combined the sublimely right with the unutterably trashy " The equivocal character of Cocteau's talent permeated even his literary style Though he sought to follow Gide in stripping down prose to a classic simplicity, his barest writing still leaves the impression that we have been reading an inveterate fantaisiste The Difficulty of Being was published in France a decade ago, and now Elizabeth Sprigge has provided a translation into English that is up to her high standards This brief book has been described as an "autobiography," but the reader seeking even a modestly detailed account of Cocteau's life will read in vain It is really a kind of notebook carefully controlled and poised, in which Cocteau releases, with infinite caution the fragments of information appropriate to the consideration of a life conceived (as Wilde would have put it) as a work of art It is a sad book, reflecting the loneliness of the established writer, living with his ghosts, withdrawing to the cork-lined room that in one form or another awaits us all There are fragments m which he returns nostalgically to the scenes of childhood, only to find all changed and to depart with ruined memories There are points where he evokes the Paris of his glory—pre-1939 Pans—with a poignancy that will catch at the throats of those who knew it There are whole passages which descend into hypochondria as he depressmgly describes the nettle rash and other disorders that are the manifestations ot his neuroses And there are rays of sheer light, when he is describing long-dead friends ("I like other people and only exist through them, ' he says) and, with an economy reminiscent of his drawings, catches them m a few short strokes which set them physically before us "Serge de Diaghilev appeared to wear the smallest hat in the world If you put this hat on, it came right down to your ears For his head was so large that any head-covering was too small for him " Of Nijmsky "His face, of Mongol type, was joined to his body by a very long and very thick neck The muscles of his thighs and those of his calves stretched the fabric of his trousers and gave him the appearance of having legs bent backwards His fingers were short, as if cut off at the knuckles In short, one would never have believed that this little monkey with sparse hair, wearing a skirted overcoat and a hat balanced on top of his head, was the idol of the public "Yet he was, and with good reason Everything about him was designed to be seen at a distance, in the limelight On the stage his over-developed muscles became slim His figure lengthened (his heels never touching the ground), his hands became the fluttering leaves of his gestures, and as for his face, it was radiant " Of Guillaume Apollinaire "While he was ahve his corpulence was not noticeable The same was true of his breathlessness which was not really breathlessness He seemed to move among very delicate objects, on ground mined with goodness knows what precious explosives A strange gait, almost as if he were walking under water, which I was to find a trace of once more in Jean Paulhan " For all the precision of these shafts of memory, the general impression left by The Difficulty of Being is that of a well-lit haze Perhaps this is because Cocteau so often tried to be philosophic and abstract, when his real forte was the particular and visual This book will add or subtract little from Cocteau's total achievement or his final standing as a writer Above all, it does not reveal whether that lambent brilliance which hovered over all his activities ever really settled I think it did, fitfully, capriciously, and that Les Enfants Ternbles, Thomas Vlmpostew, and two or three of his films will be lasting ornaments of the half-century from 1900-1950, surely the greatest epoch of the literature of France...