Script for the Film “Jean Cocteau: The First Half 1889-1929” that opened Hofstra University’s Jean Cocteau Festival 2003

Published in the Uncategorized

One summer evening in 1912, Jean Cocteau, Ballet Russe impresario Sergei Diaghilev, and the brilliant but about to go insane dancer Nijinsky were walking home after dinner. By this point, Cocteau had already accomplished quite a lot for a 21-year-old. He had published three collections of poetry, and had designed the posters for the Ballet Russe production of the Spectre of the Rose. And now they were about to open a ballet that Cocteau had written called the “The Blue God,” to be danced by Nijinsky and based on Hindu mythology. During rehearsals, Stravinsky had complained that Cocteau was not yet an artist—that he only played at art. In order to be an artist, Stravinsky insisted, one must first die to outer life the way the Phoenix was burned alive, and that only when an artist has burned away what is false can one give birth to their real self, and that it is by this solitary rebirth that an artist is separated from all others, and that is the mystical secret that is the source of art.

In a different way, Cocteau had recently gotten the same message from the influential New French Review, edited by Andres Gide. Gide had pointedly refused to review the earlier two books by Cocteau, although they were the sensation of Parisian society. In fact, before Cocteau had even published a single poem, his friendship with the actor Edouard de Max had led to his premier at the age of 16 at the Paris Opera House, where the most famous actors and actresses of the day read his poems to an audience of the best and brightest (and richest) of the art crowd. The next morning’s papers had carried stand-out reviews by three of the most difficult art critics in town. Cocteau’s success seemed assured, and he was immediately invited to the parties of the rich and famous, where he made connections, including a connection to the most important ballet company in Paris—the Ballet Russe, recently transported from Russia by Diaghilev.

In fact, Cocteau’s first negative review appeared in Gide’s magazine. It claimed his poetry was merely a collection of imitations of better poems by better poets and that any serious consideration of his work was premature. Cocteau, characteristically, went to the offices of the New French Review, and thanked the reviewer for opening his eyes and promised to live up to a higher order of poetry in the future. And, in fact, Cocteau never allowed the reprinting of anything from these first three collections and would not publish another book of poetry for seven years.

And so as they walked after dinner, Cocteau was depressed and feeling discouraged when he asked the somewhat disgruntled Diaghilev what was missing from his work, to which Diaghilev replied, “Astonish moi!” The clarity of this command was enough that after the production of “The Blue God,” Cocteau went into seclusion in his childhood home in the suburbs of Paris. By this time he had become a friend of Marcel Proust, who had recently published “Swann’s Way.” Cocteau had admired the cork-lined room Proust had specifically constructed in order to hear only his inner voices when he wrote. Once he left Paris, Cocteau tried something similar: “I lay down fully dressed twice a day. I stopped my ears with wax in order that my dreams might be rooted more deeply than in external sounds.” The product of this experiment was “Le Potomac”—a still startling collection of prose, poetry, dialogues, confessions, journal entries, letters, fantasies, and illustrations unconnected to anything exterior and devoid of any hint of plot or organization. He later claimed that his real work begins with Le Potomak.

It was also in this childhood home in the suburbs of Paris that Cocteau was born in 1889, to a well-to-do family. His father was a somewhat lackadaisical lawyer who one day just stopped going to work and, when Cocteau was nine years old, shot himself in the head in the bed he shared with his wife. Cocteau was then raised by his mother, who often kept the sickly boy home from school and enjoyed dressing him in girl’s clothes. His mother, to whom Cocteau would write over 1000 letters, became the model for every jealous, smothering, and domineering woman in Cocteau’s novels, plays, and films. And nearly every woman in Cocteau’s novels, plays, and films was jealous, smothering, and domineering.

Not surprisingly, Cocteau had trouble in school and was eventually expelled for “unseemly behavior.” He failed his exams three times and at 15 ran away from home to Marseilles, where he lived in a whore house in the red light district near the wharves disguised as a girl while working in a local Chinese restaurant and occasionally smoking opium with the sailors in port. After a year an uncle tracked him down and returned him to Paris, where his life as a poet and friend of Edouard de Max began.

When Cocteau returned to Paris from his seclusion in 1912, he moved into the Hotel Biron—what is now the Rodin studio museum—which at that time was also home to the sculptor Rodin, and the poet Rilke—which becomes more than just an interesting coincidence when one considers the importance of the myth of Orpheus in the two poets’ most important work. The following year would bring the premier of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” and the literal riots that accompanied its production. It was during this performance that Cocteau claimed he finally understood what Diaghilev had meant by his command to “Astonish moi.”

Within a year of the premier of “The Rite of Spring,” the German army had advanced to within a few miles of Paris, and Cocteau, although excused from military service for medical reasons, lied well enough to be accepted in a volunteer Red Cross ambulance corps that brought medical crews as close to the front as possible. Here he gathered the wounded and dying from the battlefields as bullets and shells flew overhead, and later tried to put the pieces of the dead back together before sending them home to their families. When it was discovered that he had enlisted under false pretenses, he was dismissed and returned to Paris, only to show up under a similar pretext at a Marine ambulance corps farther away from Paris, this time near Belgium. Uncovered as an imposter for a second time and returned to Paris, he later learned that his entire brigade had been killed the night after he left when an artillery shell exploded in their bunker.

On May 18th 1917, “Parade,” the production that Cocteau created in order to “astonish” Diaghilev, took place in Paris on the night of the battle of Verdun. Before “Parade,” there were two different art worlds in Paris—there were the leftists who lived among the ballet and diamonds crowd in Montmartre, and there were the rightists living in the seedy apartments of Montparnasse, including the post-impressionists Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Georges Braque, the poets Apollinaire and Max Jacob, and composers like Satie and Varese. Cocteau, who lived in both worlds, decided to bring them together. He had recently been commissioned to create a ballet for the Ballet Russe’s new choreographer, Massine, who had taken over when Nijinsky went mad while on tour in America.

Cocteau’s ballet was designed to present the most modern styles of four different arts, including painting, music, dance, and poetry. In addition, he described it as a “ballet realiste”—in other words, the choreography was based on gestures and movements that one could see on the streets of Paris, and the objects on stage were everyday objects, like bicycles and walking sticks. This is what led Apollinaire to coin the term “sur-realist” in “Parade’s” program notes—claiming that the ballet was more real than even reality itself. The plot was simple. The scene, known as a “Parade,” was common in those days, and perhaps most familiar to us from Seurat’s painting “The Sideshow.” A traveling circus has come to town. To stir up business, several acrobats and artists perform outside the big tent, which draws a crowd. When the acts are over, the manager attempts to get the crowd to enter the main tent, but the crowd, satisfied by the street performers, moves on. The manager, becoming more and more hysterical, finally faints. The acrobats, noticing a lull in the performance, believe it’s time for them to begin their acts again. One gets the feeling that although the production lasts only 20 minutes that it will go on this way forever.

The story was a theme that Cocteau would return to over and over again in his work—that the loneliness of the artist is that they will always be known solely through their creations, which can never be more than a faint echo and distraction from the living spark that created them—the blood of the poet—and that the real story, the essence of the artist—would forever be unknown because no one bothered to look for it—and that the point of art, if there is a point—is to be a finger pointing to the creative intelligence inside the audience as well, and that it is in the solitude of the imagination that artist and audience meet.

“Parade” was creative on a level perhaps impossible for us to imagine today. At the time, Cubist art, although ten years old, was still shocking to the patrons of the Ballet Russe, and at the time Picasso was just an unknown 35-year-old painter from Montparnasse who hadn’t had a one-person show in over 15 years, but after “Parade” had traveled the world, he was, and still is, the most famous painter in history. Very little else is known of Massine, and, as for Satie, “Parade” is probably the most famous production associated with his name, although very few have even heard its music. Its opening night was, as everyone knows, a scandal and resulted in a riot. There’s the famous image of a very large woman chasing Cocteau through the crowd yelling “There’s one of them,” and attempting to poke his eyes out with a hatpin.

From the time of “Parade,” Cocteau no longer so obviously attached himself to powerful elder male mentors, and instead became a mentor to a succession of younger male artists whom Cocteau then tried to make successful. The first of these was one of the best, a 15-year-old novelist by the name of Raymond Radiquet, who had been sent to him by the poet Max Jacob. Upon the publication of Radiquet’s highly successful “The Devil in the Flesh,” at the age of 18, he was hailed by the literary avant-garde as the greatest young prodigy since Rimbaud. Although half Cocteau’s age, Raymond is credited with changing Cocteau’s style once again, this time toward a simple classicism. This was perhaps an even more radical departure from current fashion than “Parade” had been. The times demanded absurd, meaningless, or negative art, which Radiquet claimed was evidence of a general lack of anything of substance to say. Instead Radiquet demanded clarity and precision. True art was transparent, he claimed, and only occurred in those moments when people were not aware they were witnessing art at all, but rather were in the presence of the fundamental and elementary facts and sensations that underlie reality. When poetry does not communicate it is usually because it has nothing to say and both artist and audience are wasting their time. In fact, artists should remove themselves from the social scene surrounding art entirely so as not to be contaminated by others, and to study the classics instead. And if an artist had nothing new to say, the best way to proceed would be to sit in front of a masterpiece and adapt its eternal truths to modern times. In times like these, he said, when the means of art were monopolized by frauds and charlatans, one should even invent new forms of art to separate their work from the falseness that has given art a bad name.

This explains Andre Breton’s lifelong hatred of Cocteau, or at least partially explains it, in addition to the fact that Breton was basically a hater who sought to undermine and divide others, in the same way that Cocteau was primarily a lover who enjoyed bringing artists together. At any rate, Breton’s First Surrealist Manifesto claimed that only the unadulterated product of the unconscious could be called art in its purest sense. In fact, any art that could be grasped, manipulated, and controlled by the artist’s consciousness was not art at all but rather artifice and affectation. And so Breton disrupted the opening of every public performance associated with Cocteau until well into the thirties when he just gave up in the face of Cocteau’s increasing success.

The first product of Cocteau’s relationship with Radiquet was his adaptation of Sophocles’ “Antigone,” with scenery by Picasso, costumes by Coco Chanel, her first theatrical work, and a Tiresias played by Antonin Artaud at the height of his powers. What Cocteau did was unheard of at the time although much commoner today. He took Sophocles’ play and rewrote it in a modern idiom spoken by modern characters in modern situations. He, in essence, took a play usually appreciated solely as an historical artifact, and found a way to reinvigorate it for modern times. The play, although attacked by Gide and almost everyone else except for Ezra Pound, who praised it in “The Dial,” ran for 200 performances, which was a modern record.

But by the end of the year, the 20-year-old Raymond Radiquet died an excruciatingly painful and lonely death of typhoid fever, abandoned and avoided by nearly everyone, including the characteristically hypochondriacal Cocteau. Following Radiquet’s death, Cocteau, disconsolate and guilt-ridden for months, was reintroduced to opium. He described its effects as: “Everything one achieves in life, even love, occurs on an express train racing towards death. To smoke opium is to get out of the train while it is still moving. It is to concern oneself with something other than life or death.”

Several years later, in 1925, Cocteau would have his most important experience while smoking opium. While on an elevator to visit Picasso, he had an auditory hallucination of someone shouting “My name is on the plate.” Cocteau looked at the brass plate on the elevator and read the words “Heurtebise Elevator,” even though, on returning to Picasso’s the next day, he found only the usual Otis nameplate common all over the world. Following this experience, for seven days Cocteau was in torment: He suffered a series of psychological crises in rapid succession that became one huge existential crisis that he felt could only be ended in death. As he prepared to commit suicide, he felt something he described as parthenogenesis, or he felt himself to be one creature splitting in half and becoming two, expelling a separate being. During this experience he wrote a poem that he felt this separate spirit demanded that he write against his will. This is his poem “The Angel Heurtebise,” and the origin not only of Heurtebise, who appears again and again in his poetry, plays, and films, but also of the idea that recurs in his work of a spirit who forcibly enters someone against their will or knowledge, lies dormant for a time, and then at some point struggles to waken within the artist, demanding that the artist learn to speak in its voice, often against his will. Sometimes this spirit is described as if a muse, sometimes as if an angel, and sometimes as if death itself.

But at this point Cocteau’s opium habit had become destructive—he was impotent, often ill, and he had more or less stopped writing altogether. He decided to “take the cure” and while in rehab drew himself obsessively in a mirror, which would later become one of the most important metaphors in his work. When he emerged from rehab in 1926, he was about to write one of his most important plays, “Orphee,” based on the myth of Orpheus, which would then lead to the film “Blood of a Poet,” and his entire film career, by which he is most remembered. The rest of his story is included in those later works, commonly available, many of which you will see or have reference to during the rest of this evening’s program, but I want to end with a summation of sorts on the entire career of Jean Cocteau, and the most eloquent and insightful one I’ve read is by his fellow poet, W. H. Auden, writing in 1950.

“Most artists devote themselves to one medium…. Now and then, however, an artist appears—Jean Cocteau is, in our time, the most striking example—who works in a number of media and whose productions in any one of them are so varied that it is very difficult to perceive any unity of pattern or development…. Both the public and the critics feel aggrieved…. [and] his fellow artists who know how difficult it is to succeed in one medium are equally suspicious and jealous of a man who works in several. [But Cocteau’s] attitude is always professional, that is, his first concern is for the nature of the medium and its hidden possibilities: his drawings are drawings, and not uncolored paintings, his theater is theater, not reading matter in dialogue form, his films are films, not photographed stage effects…. The lasting feeling that his work leaves is one of happiness; not, of course, in the sense that it excludes suffering, but because, in it, nothing is rejected, resented or regretted. Happiness is a surer sign of wisdom than we are apt to think, and perhaps Cocteau has more of it to offer than some others whose claims are louder and more solemn.”