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RAYNER HEPPENSTALL
Jean Cocteau: the Man and the Mirror Elizabeth Sprigge and Jean-Jacques Kihm (Gollancz 42s) This, I am sure, will always be a useful, but it is not a critically illuminating, a morally or psychologically depth-plumbing, or even a very evocative, book. Its dates and other factual information may be assumed to be reliable, since M Kihm has published a book of his own on Cocteau before and would have been put right about any mistakes he had made. It now remains only to probe a little, to expand and evaluate. To unearth less official-looking photographs would have helped with the evo- cation. Pragmatic evaluation will in part be provided by the readiness or otherwise of writers to undertake, and publishers to back, volumes more critically and otherwise search- ing or comprehensive.
Best known for her dealings with Strindberg, Miss Sprigge might have been supposed rather a one for murky depths, but the book's atti- tude is all politeness and consideration, as though the man were still with us. The vanity is not denied, narcissism is already hinted by the sub-title, there is a sharp hint of masochism at one point, an intermittent obses- sion with death is noted, the homosexual dis- position is taken for granted. None of this is explained, though we are told, twice indeed, that Jean Cocteau was `born with a silver spoon in his mouth,' and we may note for ourselves that classical factor in a homosexual situation, the early death of a father. A man whose life is conducted in public will perhaps come to lack inwardness, if not depth, though a cer- tain irreducible core of personality seems better preserved by Andrd Gide and Marcel Jouhandeau, neither of whom has been reticent. These two are mentioned from time to time, and Cocteau's relations with them are certainly important and might have been studied with illuminating effect, but the English reader who doesn't know Jouhandeau's work (most don't) will barely gather what kind of man and writer he is. A special disappointment to the reviewer was the absence of Raymond Roussel's name anywhere. I wonder if anything is to be found among Cocteau's papers? Few of his contem- poraries ever met Roussel, but Cocteau knew him at the Saint-Cloud nursing home where he went for a disintoxication cure in 1928-29. In Cocteau's case, the trouble was opium addic- tion. We don't even know what Roussel was in for.
• Oneself has only questions. Miss Sprigge and M Kihm must know the answers to some of them. I had a little to do with Cocteau two years before his death. I had expected to find him insufferably affected, but not at all. A man then seventy-two but looking fifty, easy, charming, responsive, quickly attentive, he epigrammatised a little as expected ('On ne peut plus Voir ses I remember, as he put down the telephone on his English trans- lator who had wanted to meet him next day.
'La vie morale devient aussi encombrie que
les rues'). I also, as it happens, know Maisons- Laftitte, scene of the rich bourgeois childhood.
I find the place quite unevoked by Miss Sprigge and M Kihm. I do not in the least think of it as a 'small town of leafy streets and foun- tained squares,' but perhaps that is because I commonly saw it from the Rue des Cotes side and' was otherwise much aware of the Boussac racing stables and tracks through the forest, none of them leading to the woodshed of little Jean's happy days at the turn of the century.
A woodshed matter Miss Sprigge and M Kihm do pursue interestingly is that of the boy Dargelos, his noble knees and lethal snowball, in Les Enfants tern bier. The strongest positive feeling in the Isolde film, L'Eternel Retour, was indeed, as they say or quote Cocteau saying, still that of a brother and sister, sufficient to each other in their hut. There is an obsessive profile, flat-nosed, fat-lipped, in all Cocteau's drawing. It is still there, topped with a Phrygian bonnet, in the figure of Marianne on the postage stamp which, first issued in early 1961, appeared inter- mittently on one's letters from France for six years thereafter. It was, they say, Dargelos's profile, and the most evocative of their photo- graphs is a blown-up detail from a Petit Con- dorcet school group showing this boy, whose name in real life was Dargelos and who, in later years, refused to show any interest in his famous contemporary.
Interesting in a comparable way is the extent to which seemingly fantastic episodes in Thomas the Impostor closely reflect a real-life private ambulance corps organised by Misia Edwards-Sert, one of the incomparable mil- Iionairesses Cocteau always seems to have had to hand. He was certainly one of fortune's darlings, and it may be that the inelegant sin of envy lies at the heart of. much intermittent hostility to, and belittling of, a man who, after all, wrote two highly agreeable anti-novels and a good play, always drew very prettily with, nevertheless, a steely line like that of his old friend Picasso, who never seems to have been less than humanly decent and about whom one is often led to suspect that he may have been a more considerable poet than he is generally thought.
Versatility is not a quality which commends itself to critics, who like to know at any given moment whether they are undertakers' mutes or probation officers. As an occasional dabbler in that fell trade, I feel that the modest job of a critic, vis-à-vis a versatile dead chap, is not to condemn him for being versatile, but to decide which of the products of his various activities are worth keeping. I don't want to be expelled from the literary critics' union over a demarcation dispute with the film critics, but I'd say that the camera is indefeasibly literal- minded, knew papier mdche and false hair when it saw them, and thus tended to realism, with any intended symbols much underlying, so that Cocteau's efforts have little durable interest outside film societies. His draughtsman's art strikes me as even more rigidly limited than, say, Eric Gill's, yet, like Gill's, unique and therefore memorable. I wish my views in my own field were equally distinct. I'd hoped that Miss Sprigge and M Kihm might help to make them more so. I can hardly blame them for not having distinct views.
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