Jean Cocteau

Jean Cocteau: The Renaissance Man Nobody Trusted

Weaning himself off opium in 1929, Jean Cocteau wrote *Les Enfants terribles* in a single week. It is still the novel he is most read for. The detail is characteristic in every respect: the speed, the self-destruction converted into product, and the faint suspicion — which followed him from adolescence to the grave — that a man who could do that could not possibly be serious.

The Frivolous Prince

He was born on 5 July 1889 at Maisons-Laffitte, outside Paris, into a socially prominent family. His father, a lawyer and amateur painter, killed himself when Cocteau was nine. He attended the Lycée Condorcet from 1900 to 1904 and left home at fifteen. At nineteen he published his first volume of verse, *La Lampe d'Aladin*, and by his early twenties he was a fixture of bohemian Paris under a nickname he did nothing to discourage: the Frivolous Prince. He knew Proust, Gide and Barrès before he had written anything of consequence.

Parade

In 1912 he worked with Léon Bakst on *Le Dieu bleu* for the Ballets Russes. Then Sergei Diaghilev challenged him to write a ballet scenario, and the result was *Parade* in 1917 — sets by Picasso, music by Erik Satie, programme note by Guillaume Apollinaire. It is one of the founding scandals of modernism, and Cocteau, at twenty-eight, was its impresario. He became a central advocate for the avant-garde, shaping the composers who became known as Les Six, and helped name the cabaret Le Boeuf sur le Toit, which he then made famous by frequenting it.

In 1918 he met the poet Raymond Radiguet, then fifteen. They worked and travelled together for five years; Cocteau promoted him relentlessly and arranged the publication of *Le Diable au corps*. Radiguet died suddenly in 1923. Cocteau was said to be shattered, though he left Paris almost immediately with Diaghilev for a Ballets Russes performance — the kind of ambiguity that his detractors have always found conclusive and his defenders have always found human.

Opium

The addiction that followed changed his prose. He recorded the 1929 cure in *Opium: Diary of a Cure*, illustrated with his own pen-and-ink drawings, and the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain shepherded him through it and briefly back into the Church; together they founded the review *Le Roseau d'Or*. The novels came in a rush: *Le Grand Écart* (1923), the anonymously published and frankly homoerotic *Le Livre blanc* (1928), and *Les Enfants terribles* (1929).

The plays came next, and several of them held the stage: *La Voix humaine* (1930), a monologue for one woman and a telephone; *La Machine infernale* (1934), his Oedipus; *Les Parents terribles* (1938); *La Machine à écrire* (1941); *L'Aigle à deux têtes* (1944). In 1940 he wrote *Le bel indifférent* for Édith Piaf, who made an enormous success of it.

The Orphic Trilogy

Film was the last and best of his lives. *Le Sang d'un poète*, made in 1930 and shown publicly in 1932, was followed sixteen years later by *La Belle et la Bête* (1946), *Les Parents terribles* (1948), *Orphée* (1950) and finally *Le Testament d'Orphée* (1960), in which Picasso and the matador Luis Miguel Dominguín appear. The first, third and last form what is now called the Orphic Trilogy.

The British Film Institute recommends *La Belle et la Bête* as the place to start, noting that Cocteau achieved with in-camera effects and chiaroscuro "some of the most indelible images in all of cinema," and that *Le Testament d'Orphée* — dream logic rather than narrative — is his most rewarding and most difficult work. His own account of the job was deliberately unpretentious: making a film was like carpentry, and what he built were tables at which the audience could hold their own séances and conjure their own meanings. He distrusted intellectuals and artistic elitism in roughly equal measure. Pauline Kael observed that the revivals of his films taught audiences to see cinema as art rather than entertainment.

He also drew, painted and built. He designed sets for the Théâtre de la Mode in 1945, covered the Chapelle Saint-Pierre at Villefranche-sur-Mer in murals in 1956, decorated the marriage hall at Menton the following year, and in 1947 illustrated a clandestine edition of Genet's *Querelle de Brest* with twenty-nine explicit drawings.

Marais, and the Occupation

Cocteau never concealed his homosexuality. *Le Livre blanc* opens by declaring a lifelong love of "the strong sex that I find legitimate to call the fair sex." His longest attachments were to the actor Jean Marais, from 1937 to 1947, whom he cast in *The Eternal Return*, *La Belle et la Bête*, *Ruy Blas* and *Orphée*, and to Édouard Dermit, from 1947 until his death, whom he legally adopted.

His politics were, by his own confession, "non-existent" — he held to pacifism and antiracism, praised the Republic as "a haven for the persecuted," and applauded Picasso's *Guernica*. Then, under the Occupation, he joined a round table of French and German intellectuals at the Hôtel Georges V, recorded in his diary that France had been disrespectful toward Hitler, and published *Salut à Breker* in 1942 in praise of Arno Breker, the Reich's favourite sculptor. He was charged with collaboration after the war and cleared; there is evidence he used his German contacts trying to save friends, including Max Jacob. Later he drew close to communists including Louis Aragon and called Stalin "the only great politician of the era." It is not a coherent record.

Why Jean Is Called a Genius

The case is breadth, and breadth is exactly what makes people suspicious. Cocteau produced poems, novels, plays, ballets, films, drawings, murals, sculpture and set designs at a professional standard in every one, and the BFI notes that he treated his own life as another work to be composed. Annette Insdorf wrote that he "left behind a body of work unequalled for its variety of artistic expression"; the *National Observer* judged that among his generation of artists he "came closest to being a Renaissance man." He was elected to the Académie française and the Royal Academy of Belgium in 1955.

The specific faculty is transposition: an ability to take one image — the mirror as a door, the poet consumed by his own myth — and realise it in whatever medium was to hand, without the idea losing force in translation. *Orphée* is the same thought as his Oedipus play and his drawings, executed with different tools. Few artists can do this even twice.

The counter-case is the one that has dogged him since he was twenty. Critics have called him a dilettante fixated on surface, a man who was present at every important moment of the modern movement without ever quite originating one — Picasso's designer, Satie's librettist, Radiguet's publicist. The BFI concedes the charge exists and argues it misses "the aching romance that lies beneath," which is a defence of feeling rather than of rigour. His collaborationist episode was real, his politics were incoherent, and his facility was so great that it is genuinely difficult to distinguish, in his weaker work, between invention and decoration. He was not a systematic thinker. He was something rarer and less respectable: a man who could do anything, quickly.

Legacy

He served as a Commander of the Legion of Honour, honorary president of the Cannes Film Festival, and president of the Jazz Academy. He died of a heart attack at his château at Milly-la-Forêt on 11 October 1963, aged seventy-four, hours after being told that Édith Piaf had died the previous day. He is buried beneath the floor of the Chapelle Saint-Blaise des Simples at Milly, under an epitaph he chose himself: *Je reste avec vous* — I stay with you.

Achievements

• Commander of the Legion of Honour
• Notable work: Orpheus
• Notable work: The Blood of a Poet
• Notable work: Beauty and the Beast
• Worked as painter, playwright and film director