Jean Cocteau (review)

Following on from his recent book on Jean Cocteau the filmmaker ( Jean Cocteau, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2006), James S. Williams has taken on the difficult task of integrating Cocteau’s prolific multi-disciplinary artistic activity into his turbulent and controversial personal life as part of Reaktion’s series of biographical portraits of leading cultural figures. As Williams states in the introduction and perfectly illustrates throughout the book, Cocteau’s ‘compulsive desire to stage aesthetically the drama of his own life’ (p. 8) meant that the two domains were virtually inseparable, continually reflecting on and responding to each other. The book is divided into 21 short chapters, each dealing with a separate stage in Cocteau’s life or particular historical landmark. Moving fluidly from one period to another, Williams attempts to build a sense of ‘the ‘real’ Jean Cocteau’ (p. 8), by penetrating the impeccably constructed and increasingly high-profile public persona. Accordingly, much space is given to Cocteau’s professional and personal relationships, including his adopted ‘family’ of companions and lovers, which, in some cases (such as Raymond Radinguet and Edouard Dermit), would give rise to the most symbiotic of creative partnerships. Although clearly enamoured by this extremely complex and contradictory personality, Williams maintains adequate objective distance and never falls into uncritical admiration of the artist. Respecting the title of the series — ‘Critical Lives’ — the book manages to draw the reader into the whirlwind saga of Cocteau’s life and work without entirely relinquishing an analytical stance. Towards the end of the book, Williams openly admits that Cocteau’s constant need to be loved and admired at any price, always highly aware of his public appearance, was his ultimate creative downfall, reflected in the relative weakness of later works (particularly the contrived grandeur of his decorative visual style) in comparison to some of his more accomplished literary achievements. Although Williams mostly gives equal attention to all areas of Cocteau’s creative activity, he ultimately privileges his cinematic work, admittedly the domain in which the artist was most prolific in the later years of his life. The final chapter discusses the medium of film in terms of its all-encompassing, almost redemptive power, which provided Cocteau with the means to interrogate and consolidate all the complex contradictions of his life and work. Williams sees The Testament of Orpheus (1960), for example, as the ‘culmination of more than fifty years of experimentation and practice’ (p. 227). As is to be expected from a biographical study, the works themselves often remain in the background, allowing the book to be read, for most of the time, like a novel. This is to Williams’s great credit, since his highly absorbing account of Cocteau’s colourful, yet troubled life leaves the reader eager to (re)visit the work of one of the most fascinating artists of the twentieth century.