Gay abandon
PATRICK ANDERSON An Impersonation of Angels: A Biography of lean Cocteau Frederick Brown (Longman 60s) `I am a lie who tells the truth.' Aphoristic and paradoxical, this characteristic state- ment of Jean Cocteau's suggests the main dilemma of his life. A bourgeois in love with the avant-garde, a poet devoted to the world of fashion and chic and possessed of a genius for publicity, a narcissus who could only prove his existence through becoming other people (that endless string of heroes and lovers) or by resuscitating the myths of his youth, Cocteau was doomed to live in a world of masks and could rarely make up his mind as to the difference between appearance and reality. 'Being and living are two different things. By virtue of trying to be I forgot to live.' Or, as a French critic explained it, 'paraitre was for Cocteau a more crucial verb than etre'.
It is easy to mock an enfant terrible who had a somewhat calculating and not always welcome finger in so many pies. In addi- tion to his aristocratic circle (Laure de Chevigne, Etienne de Beaumont etc) he was, or thought he was, a friend of Picasso, whom he undoubtedly amused but who was to call'him a whore; of Gide, who snubbed him on various occasions; of Diaghilev, who growing bored with his confessions suddenly demanded 'Astonish me!'; of Stravinsky, who found him highly diverting but in the manner of a feuilletoniste and go-getter (as did T. S. Eliot); of Proust, a genuine intimate and admirer although he turned against him in the end; of Maurice Sachs, whose initial enthusiasm changed to the hostile comment, 'he burned the way ice bumes, without warming'; and of Jean Genet, whom he once rescued from a long gaol sentence. Supporter of cubism, spokes- man and impresario of Les Six, in at the start of the Ballets Russes (for whom he wrote Parade in 1917), always anxious to promote the interests of fellow artists (notably his brilliant boy-friend, Raymond Radiguet), he stood at the very centre of the modern movement in France.
Nevertheless, he was suspect. As Adrienne Monnier put it, `He is never the first to leap over the barricades, but he is always the first to plant the flag.' To this fashion- seeking opportunism must be added the fact that Cocteau belonged in part to the gratin and the Right Bank—or, as his new biographer puts it, was 'a cultivated bour- geois masquerading as a literary Jacobin'— and that it was difficult to claim that he had ever written a masterpiece. He himself admitted 'The eloquence I was allotted doesn't have much stamina.' The story went round that he was a plagiarist and that Apollinaire had declared him a false poet. Andre Breton, in particular, remained per- manently hostile; the NRF refused to print him; and so, while to the popular press and the bourgeois he appeared the essence of what is adventurous in art and letters, the literary avant-gardistes—Dadaists, Surreal. lists, left-wingers--closed their doors.
Powdered and rouged, a drug addict for most of his life but also a frenetic mono- loguist, this high camp homosexual. %%hose natural elegance could be tempered with a good deal of untidiness and even grubbiness, darted from salon to night-club, from editorial office to backstage theatre and film-set, from Paris to Villefranche with its sailors' bars or Cap Ferrat with its millionaire hostess, casting the net of his insinuating and instantaneous friendship in every direction as he discoursed upon the obsessive symbols of an ambiguous identity: the mirrors, the cameras, the circus clowns, the exotic negroes, the closed rooms with their incestuous couples, the prefaces to prefaces, the plays within plays. In the end. `born con man' though Breton might assert him to be, he was elected to the French Academy. He fussed over his costume and Francois Mauriac delivered a feline judg- ment which began with 'All the luminous threads of an era interwove their fibres in him...
Much of the above, including some of its tone, I owe to Professor Brown's book. For a work of American scholarship this is extremely lively and readable. Professor Brown has something of the aphoristic''' glitter of Hugh Kenner and he can build an intricate social scene—the last spasms of Proust's beau monde, the cultural move to Montparnasse, the louche hotel at Ville- franche—with all George D. Painter's skill. Unhappily this brilliance goes with a good deal of brashness. Colloquialisms, often American, are used much too often; their effect is to scoff at their subject and to draw Professor Brown into the picture far too prominently. Almost all the French is trans- lated, without printing the originals. and the translation follows the same ignobly racy style. Worst of all, Professor Brown seems actively to dislike Cocteau and his work; he is happiest when he ignores him altogether in favour of the literary and artistic history of the period although he clearly enjoys the occasional wisecrack at Cocteau's expense: 'His novels and plays have the simplicity of skeletons dancing their danse -macabre on an ice floe . . His brilliant prattle was an act of con- sumption, not creation: like chain-smoking, it waged war against neutrality and bore- dom, it gave a scent to odourless time. it camouflaged his person . .
Cocteau's search for identity is far too symptomatic of the romantic and pest- romantic periods to be regarded as a joke. His modishness served many causes without degrading them. He had beautiful manner and great kindness. His :prattle' delight a great many people, from Karsavina to Simone de Beauvoir. What a pity that Professor Brown has been unable to pin any of it down—has been unable, indeed, to show Cocteau as a human being even relation to intimates such as Jean Marais, Edouard Dermit and Francine Weisweiller Furthermore, I doubt whether anyone has read Les Enfants Terribles or wh' has seen the films Le Sang d'un Pale an Orphie will forget these works. Professor Brown's liveliness has been gained by den) ing life to a man who was full of it an who from time to time interpreted it W humour and with images of disturbin power.
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