Jean Cocteau by Bettina L. Knapp (review)

120 MODERN DRAMA Afay realizes the need to fuse body and mind, and does so symbolically in the fourth novel, Cashel Byron's Profession. Having achieved an inner harmony, then, the young writer needs only a faith to live by in order to become a force in the world, and he finds it in the gospel of Karl Marx, the patron saint of Sidney Trefusis in An Unsocial Socialist. Dietrich next offers in a short chapter a resume of Shaw's search for what he calls a "Heavenly Father" and concludes that Shaw settled for a new order of things on earth populated with Christian Gentlemen, or Supermen, as part of his vision of the future. Dietrich may be right that the novels are better than is generally admitted, and he may be right that the novels represent a faithful representation of the growth of an artist's mind, but it is not a very good book. The prose style is undistinguished , and sometimes labored. The chapters are extremely uneven in quality, the best one being the discussion of Immaturity and the worst the concluding chapter. The most serious single flaw which undercuts the worth of the whole book, however , from the title to its concluding paragraph, is Dietrich's misunderstanding of Shaw's religious faith. He confuses his own rationalism with Shaw's mysticism, and goes miserably astray. Dietrich opposes Superman (the humanist who believes "that flesh is the proper material for forming arts of the spirit') and Anti-Man (the anti-humanist who believes "that flesh is a corruption of the spirit"), and decides that Shaw defines life as "the spirit's ability to form and reform itself in the eternal art of material living." He is apparently blind to Shaw's implicit faith in an evolutionary Life Force working inexorably through men and creation in its attempt to understand and realize itself. For Shaw, the upward thrust of creative evolution can only stop at godhood, unilludedly, and mankind is only a stage in the development of Life on the way to its ultimate end. But Dietrich imagines that Shaw cannot mean what he says in Man and Superman, Back to Methuselah, and elsewhere, and posits instead "humane Christian Gentlemen" as the highest desirable purpose of the Life Force, and Shaw as one of its prime products. Clearly , no man can hold such a basic misconception of Shaw's faith and write a good book about him. RAYMOND S. NELSON Morningside College JEAN COCTEAU, by Bettina L. Knapp. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1970. Twayne World Authors Series, no. 84. 197 pp. The Twayne Company has been unusually successful in making its contributors to the World Authors Series keep to specifications: at least in the volumes that I have read they have uniformly presented surveys which are comprehensive, concise, with measured amounts of critical analysis. Successfully avoiding purely historical summary, they have at the same time resisted the temptation of the subjective essay. Bettina L. Knapp, like the others, offers therefore a trustworthy introduction for the non-specialist and a useful "refresher" for those who may know the field. Although the formula for the series precludes great originality in the approach, Mrs. Knapp's study of Jean Cocteau does, nevertheless, have something of a thesis. Cocteau has generally been considered as more of a facile artist than a great one; on this postulate, Mrs. Knapp develops the thought that it was the awareness of his shortcomings that served as Cocteau's inspiration. Throughout his life he tried to prove something that he knew to be false-his artistic greatness. I am not sure 1971 BOOK REVIEWS 121 how much aware Cocteau really was of his shortcomings, but the idea orients us sympathetically towards the author without exaggerating his accomplishments and makes his dependence upon artistic catalysts (from Stravinsky to Sartre) rather touching. Yet this bit of psychoanalysis which is offered as a key to the artistic personality does not open up the whole Cocteau. Mrs. Knapp would have to treat more fully Cocteau as an extrovert homosexual of the Parisian arty circles to bring out the person and to explain his characters, plots, dialogues, and all the razzmatazz of...