The Perpetual Golden Boy

...It is doubtful, and here perhaps lies the essential weakness of his art, it rarely touched the vivifying earth...

...The Perpetual Golden Boy Cocteau By Francis Steegmuller Little, Brow n. 583 pp $12 50 Professional Secrets: An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau Drawn from his Lifetime Writings by Robert Phelps Farrar, Straus and Giroux 321 pp $8 50 Reviewed by George Woodcock Editor, "Canadian Literature", author, "Tlie Writer and Politics" Whenever I read that song from Cymbelme, "Fear no more the heat o' the sun," and that sad and marvelous couplet, "Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimneysweepers, come to dust," I am reminded of Cocteau For of all the golden lads of poetry he was the most durable, taking the longest time to come to dust not merely in flesh but above all in spirit Thmk of the other golden boys Shelley and Byron and Keats all dead young Rimbaud abandoning poetry for the hell of gunrunmng in Abyssinia, and also dying young Rupert Brooke dead in his 20s and Dylan Thomas in his 30s That extraordinary genius, Raymond Ra-diguet, whom Cocteau discovered and loved and bullied into completing his masterpiece, Le Diable au Corps, annihilated by typhoid at 23 And those golden lads who did not die young—how many of them kept alive the flame that first illuminated them'' Cocteau had few rivals It was Radiguet, aged 16, who noticed first this peculiar quality of Cocteau "Jean Cocteau," he said, "will be 18 all his life " And this was really true For Cocteau sustained to the end the illusion of his own youth "I have never been handsome," he said as an old man, "youthfulness is my form of beauty " He lived like some glittering ephemeral creature, to whom a special license of longevity had been granted by the gods In Sicily in 1950 Truman Capote saw him, already in his 60s, flirting with his aged rival, Andre Gide, and caught the scene in a cruel, accurate image—"still the rainbow-winged and dancing dragonfly inviting the toad not merely to admire but perhaps to devour him " Even Cocteau's death, occurring when the imitation of youth had at last become impossible, seemed almost as if it were willed A reporter rang him in his house near Fon-tainebleau on the morning of October 11, 1963 He told him that Edith Piaf was dead "They're all going1" Cocteau cried out "They're all leaving me'" He told his housekeeper that she would not see him alive again, and went upstairs to his room and died the same day It was a death as dramatic as he had made his life For when one considers Cocteau's achievements, it is the Life rather than the Works that remains captivating, and this is one of the reasons Francis Steegmuller has been able to produce so excellent a book by carefully avoiding the role of the literary critic and concentrating on that of the biographer Read again, a few years after his death, there is little of Cocteau's vast literary output that retains the interest it had when it appeared as the latest production of this creature who so mcredibly combined fancy, vanity and industry Two of his novels, Thomas I' lmposteur and Les Enfants Terri-bles, are still good reading, models of controlled whimsicality His Opium, the account of a stubborn addiction, has a renewed mterest m our drug-obsessed age, particularly since Cocteau was one of the few artists whose creativity does not seem to have been diminished appreciably by the use of narcotics Although much was made of his drawings, they now seem only dilettante imitations of his friend Picasso Cocteau was more at home in the theater, which satisfied his natural love for the spectacular, than in mere literature, and perhaps most happy in his cinematic experiments, where his power of improvisation and his sense of the immediate were most effective I suspect that as an artist he will be remembered and valued longest for his films, for The Blood of a Poet, Beauty and the Beast and Orpheus Still, it is above all the man that fascinates Like his work, Cocteau was superficial in a very special way, there were no depths because everything was revealed, as in an anatomical model—every emotion, every one of the secret acts and desires most men conceal, was made the subject of lyrical statement Precisely because they are so obvious—no fearful and intriguing darknesses, no ambiguities untangled—his writings fail to hold our contmued attention But as a kind of sophisticated Gallic clown, what a performance he sustained' Walking across the Place de la Concorde in 1912, Serge Diaghilev (that "sacred monster," as Cocteau regarded him) turned to the young poet, and said "Astound me'" Cocteau took the phrase as a watchword He began by astoundmg Diaghilev with the scenario for Parade Satie wrote the music, Picasso designed the costumes and scenery, Matisse did the choreography, and the ballet became a success of scandal, bringing Cubism for the first time into the public eye Following the initial performance in 1917, the fashionable world of Pans was so enraged that it was only the uniform and the bandaged head of Guillaume Apollmaire that saved Cocteau and Picasso from the hatpins of angry Parisian matrons—at least according to Cocteau Cocteau was an actor, and an actor requires a stage His stage was Paris m perhaps the greatest of its many exciting periods, and Francis Steegmuller presents to us the comedian in his setting The world that Proust preserved in prose and where Cocteau began is there, as is Proust Gide, with his strange combination of Calvmist moralism and homosexual inclinations, stands constantly in the background, a desiccated wizard who terrifies and charms the hero Picasso and Stravinsky and Les Six move familiarly across the stage In the audience are the Dadaists and Surrealists under the noisy command of Andre Breton, they are the bitter enemies of Cocteau, who they suspect has stolen their fire, and the heckling is no less incessant than it was in real life (A Cocteau first night was not complete without a scandal—sometimes, one is led to suspect, arranged by Cocteau himself ) But there are recesses on the stage, little illuminated caves covered by transparent scrim through which one can see the passions Cocteau conducted half m public, the parade of usually talented youths who engaged his feelings And in darker but still visible caves there are the struggles with opium and conscience, and Maritain standmg like an admonishing figure to receive the penitent confessions that were part of the vast improvised drama It is all splendid stuff for the biographer who, like Steegmuller, is also a cultural historian He makes the best of it in his Cocteau, the landscape of an era as much as the portrait of a man A good deal of the material Steegmuller uses comes from Coc-teau's own recollections, scattered among his various works From these, m Professional Secrets, Robert Phelps has put together what he calls "An Autobiography of Jean Cocteau " It is rather, as perhaps fits such a personality, a garland of memories, many of them enhanced with time and telling Steegmuller has effectively criticized several of the tales Phelps presents, and it might have been better to have termed Professional Secrets an au-tomythology instead of an autobiography What strikes one most about these recollections is their extraordinarily limited outlook, they are the outpourings of a theatrical narcissist Everyone Cocteau met became a mirror in which he saw some aspect of himself reflected, every place he visited was the setting for drama, seen for its theatrical possibilities and not for its real content The people sleeping in Bombay streets are not a human tragedy but an extraordinary night decor, and Japan is memorable almost entirely for the kabuki theater where old men transform themselves into young girls, and for the conventions of the floating world of the geisha Did the nontheatncal world ever exist for Cocteau...